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Selling on eBay How to make money in the online marketplace.
NetSuite Bids on Auction Integration By Michelle Megna
February 15, 2007
NetSuite today announced a partnership with eBay that will meld the auction giant's listing and selling features into its on-demand business management suite. The move follows the Google-QuickBooks and eBay-Office Accounting 2007 application integrations that were both announced last September.
The NetSuite-eBay partnership provides sellers with the opportunity to manage auctions in real-time together with other aspects of their online business, such as overseeing inventory, accounting, search-engine and e-mail marketing and site hosting.
By fusing the two, NetSuite says it will help both small businesses that are growing and need an automated method for listing, inventory and fulfillment management, and larger companies that, for example, need an easy way to sell excess inventory on eBay without creating a separate storefront and rekeying in duplicate product information.
Other ways the partnership will help growing online businesses include offering the ability to:
Push products to eBay.com and eBay Stores directly from the NetSuite product catalog with the appropriate listing categorizations and pricing (Starting, Reserve and Buy It Now) to maximize visibility and placement.
Initiate Chinese or Dutch auction-style listings while specifying scheduling, duration, promotions and much more.
View all live listings within NetSuite including details on how the bidding is progressing and when the listing is set to close.
Receive orders from eBay buyers automatically once the listing closes and a sale takes place — this automatic import creates both a customer record within NetSuite along with a sales order that flows to the fulfillment and shipping processes.
Automatically lower an item's available inventory when it has been sold through eBay and update the customer's purchase history, permitting future up-sell and cross-sell marketing campaigns to be targeted to that customer.
For existing NetSuite customers, the eBay functionality can be added by downloading a module and pricing will be based on three tiers of site activity. To entice eBayers, NetSuite is offering a promotion until May 31, 2007 that will give new customers a 10-percent discount on their NetSuite subscription each month for a year.
In addition to eBay integration, NetSuite, Inc. today announced a host of new features to help e-tailers more efficiently run their businesses. These e-commerce features are available immediately in the standard NetSuite service, without additional charge. NetSuite starts at $499 for the first user per month, then $99 per additional user per month. Note that the multiple site support features are not available until summer of this year.
Here are the highlights:
Multiple Web sites: Users can publish different Web sites from a single NetSuite account each with its own products, domain name and look. Each site offers shoppers a distinct password-protected customer self-service center, where shoppers can review purchases, track packages and correspond with the company.
Multi-language: E-tailers can translate every page, every field and every button into a nearly unlimited number of languages. Shoppers will see a drop-down with the names of the languages, and as soon as they choose a new language, the entire site is translated to that language.
Multi-currency: Cutomers can choose their currency on the Web site, and complete the transaction in the currency of their choice. The merchant can either automatically convert prices into foreign currencies using a currency conversion rate, or can set specific product prices for each currency.
Multi-payment: Consumers can pay with credit cards or via Paypal. For B2B commerce, businesses can pay via invoice, purchasing card credit card and PayPal.
Automated Upsell/Cross-sell: NetSuite now enables companies to display automatic up-sell and cross-sell recommendations based on what similar customers have purchased.
Promotional Tools: Gift certificates, item coupons a shipping cost estimator, minimum-order quantity, E-mail page to a friend, free shipping promotions are also now available.
Electronic Product Distribution: NetSuite now supports the sales of digital goods. Customers can download files and/or software for a fee via order management or free. If the downloaded file requires the customer to enter a license code, you can enter the license code into the NetSuite record and NetSuite will display the code to the customer.
Search Engine Optimization: NetSuite provides the tools companies need to ensure their prominence in search engine results including meta-tags, alt-image tags, page titles, 404 "Page Not Found" redirects and so on.
Site Search Analysis: New reporting functionality indicates how many results are being returned for each query, and highlights the queries that are returning zero results. Web shop owners can also analyze how many querying visitors ended up becoming customers, and how much they purchased, as well as compare organic and paid search results.
Widget Site Launches In other e-commerce news, Vendio Services, Inc. just launched Widgipedia.com, devoted to accelerating the development and distribution of Web and desktop "widgets" across a growing number of widget development platforms. Widgipedia.com was created by a team of widget enthusiasts at Vendio who got their start in the area by developing the popular Vendio Gallery, a Flash widget currently found in millions of eBay auction and storefront listings.
Widgets have become popular over the last several years as the Web 2.0 system allowed developers to use open interfaces to extend Web site functionality to the desktop and to embed features of one Web site into another. In addition to galleries at auction sites, another example of a widget is when you get the local weather forecast on your computer without going to a Web page.
Also know as gadgets, gizmos, or desklets, according to Vendio, there are two main classes of widgets: desktop widgets and web widgets. Desktop widgets are small applications that run on a desktop and usually (but not always) require the user to download and install an "engine" in order to run them. Yahoo, Google, Apple and Microsoft have all developed widget "engines." Web widgets are "sections" that can be inserted in any Web page, such as a personal blog, a MySpace page, an eBay auction, or an online store. Each of these two types of widgets can be built using multiple platforms, which can make for a confusing development environment.
After three months of beta testing, Widgipedia now provides a central resource for those creating widgets across all development environments for both the desktop and the Web, and includes developer forums, code samples, "engine" information and a variety of helpful hints.
Developers can also submit their widgets to the Widgipedia gallery for download by others. Widgets can be found in the Widgipedia gallery by browsing, identifying items in the "tag cloud," or by searching, including a smart search that finds widgets by keyword, user and development platform.
In addition, Widgipedia also lets developers add several parameters for their widgets that users can select to customize their Web widget prior to copying the small bit of code needed to add it to their Web pages.
Queries for Customers Finally, for those who want to get some insight into their site traffic, justASKthem.com, a customer-satisfaction research company, announced yesterday that it released a survey e-tailers can use to help quantify who visits their Web store, who stays to conduct business and who leaves and why.
Set-up is fully automated, all you do is copy and paste the code from the Web site on to your own Web pages, with one version pre-formatted to fit into the space of a standard Web ad. Pricing starts at $25 for 500 responses, but new subscribers can test out the system during a free trial period for 200 responses. The introductory pricing is available until the end of April 2007.
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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