eBay automation can be an incredible time-saver if you’re an active seller and have eBay listings that require constant updating. You can automate repetitive tasks so you don’t have to spend hours on each listing every day, freeing up your time to work on ot
her essential aspects of your business.
Automation will not only help improve your eBay business by lowering the amount of time you spend running it but will also increase its profitability with innovative selling strategies.
Everything from product research, creating listings, promoting these listings, managing your inventory, sharing your listings on other platforms, and fulfilling orders can be done using eBay automation.
Here’s how to set up and use eBay automation for your business and make eBay selling easier.
Automating eBay Product Research
Product research is how you validate your product ideas and determine if there is sufficient demand for a particular product. Product research is indispensable for selling on eBay. Too many sellers have ended up with a lot of dead stock on their hands because they didn’t carry out proper product research before buying inventory.
You can easily automate product research with the right tools. There are a number of options available for product research but Zik Autopilot is the only tool that allows you to automatically find thousands of items from major suppliers such as AliExpress, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Walmart in minutes.
The process is simple and straightforward. All you have to do is navigate to Autopilot in Zik Pro Tools. Select “New Scan,” give your search a name and choose all the filters that apply. You can filter your search by Sales Date Range, Supplier, price range, the minimum and maximum number of sales, competition, and return on investment (ROI). You can also choose to include similar items in your search results.
After, you can select “Start your Scan” and wait for the scan to move from Pending to Completed status. Once the scan is completed, you can click on it to view the results.
And as simple as that, you have a list of products you can source and sell in your eBay store. Product Research doesn’t have to be complicated.
Zik Autopilot comes bundled with the Enterprise Plan, priced at $89.99 per mon
Automating Listing Creation and Optimization
After finding the products you want to sell, the next step is to create listings on eBay. Your listings are what customers see first. Good listings help you sell more items.
If you run a fairly large store with thousands of products, creating listings manually can be burdensome. And that’s where listing automation comes in.
You can export the results from Autopilot’s scan into a .CSV file. You can also upload the products directly to eBay using integrations with listing creation tools.
However, it is recommended to export your selected items into .CSV because the integrations are not completely optimized yet. If you chose Amazon in the drop menu for Supplier options, the .CSV file generated will contain each product’s Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN), eBay title, the supplier title, the product’s price on eBay, and the supplier’s price. You can copy the ASINs to your listing tool to put the products up in your store.
There are other listing tools you might find useful, due to the templating and multi-channel options they offer:
- AutoDS: AutoDS Finder has a variety of options for uploading your products, including regular uploads, bulk uploads, the scheduled uploader, and the recurring uploads, which allow you to completely automate the process of listing your products.
- Kyozou: Kyozou is a multi-channel e-commerce solution that allows you to manage your inventory and listings across several platforms. It also provides listing templates and allows bulk revision of listings. For sellers who want to list while away from computers, Kyozou includes a listing scheduler. Kyozou is actually certified by eBay and offers direct integration with eBay, eBay Motors, Amazon, and other major marketplaces. It also includes the ability to post items to multiple eBay seller accounts at once.Kyozou has a unique pricing model that allows you to pay by a percentage of sales or a set amount per listing.
- InkFrog: inkFrog is an inexpensive listing tool that helps you create beautiful, well-designed product listings. It integrates with e-commerce platforms such as Wix, Amazon, Shopify, and eBay. It offers free eBay templates and the one-page lister makes it easier than ever to create listings. There is a 14-day free trial, and then you can upgrade to the ‘Small’ plan, priced at $11 per month. inkFrog is a great option for budding eBay sellers.
You can learn more about eBay listing best practices here.
Automating eBay SEO
Search Engine Optimization is not only needed when you want your blog or website to rank high on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages. You also need SEO when it comes to making your eBay listings visible to buyers.
Cassini is eBay’s search engine that is focused on finding the best items for buyers as quickly and efficiently as possible. Optimizing your eBay listings will help you get more buyers and close more sales.
There are three main factors that are considered by the Cassini algorithm in ranking product listings. These include:
- Search engine optimization: This factor is mainly concerned with keyword placement in the title, item specifics, and item description. It also takes a look at the product price, shipping, and the store’s return policy. Having a return period that is longer than your competitors can help your items rank higher.
- Listing Performance: Cassini considers the performance of your listings in ranking your listings. This includes your click-through rate, conversion rate, and overall sales history. You can improve your listing performance with better titles, item descriptions, and product descriptions.
- Account Performance: Your account’s performance is another important metric that Cassini considers. It looks at your sell through rate, your customer service rating, your defect transaction rate, and your late shipment rate.The sell-through rate is the percentage of your active listings that become sales i.e active listings/sales X 100. Your transaction defect rate, i.e the percentage of your transactions that have defects, must not be greater than 2% to meet eBay’s minimum standard.
Needless to say, eBay SEO can be a tough enough job for a single person to handle, even for a store that carries a small number of items. When it comes to optimizing thousands of listings, the task becomes nearly impossible.
Listing tools like inkFrog and Auctiva help with listing optimization and boosting your listing visibility. However, search optimization is a process that requires human input to ensure quality output and cannot be completely automated.
Here are some tips that will help you make search-optimized listings as quickly and efficiently as possible:
- Use Zik Analytics’ eBay Title Builder: Your product’s title is one of the major factors that decide how high your product ranks on eBay. The Title Builder allows you to take ideas from AliExpress and eBay to optimize your listings. It provides generic and long-tail keyword suggestions to increase your rankings on eBay.
- Offer excellent customer service: Customer service is key to your success on eBay. Simply offering outstanding customer service is a great way to outperform the competition. Answer any questions promptly and treat your customers with proper regard.
- List new products almost every day: Another way to boost your listings is to list new items every day. The algorithm favors sellers that add new products regularly.
- Take excellent product pictures: You need to take pictures in good lighting and highlight as many details as possible. Don’t use any stock photos or use photos with watermarks.
- Ship as early as possible and ensure product quality. Keep your transaction defect rate as low as possible and avoid late shipments.
Automating eBay Marketing
Search engine optimization can give you listings a much-needed boost but paid advertising can help you attract buyers who weren’t even looking for your items.
eBay offers in-built options for running ad campaigns, such as:
- Promoted Listings: Promoted Listings help you stand out from other sellers in your niche. According to WebInterpret, 1.2 million sellers use promoted listings on over 310 million listings. Promoted Listings appear more frequently where buyers are likely to see them.Only Top Rated and Above Standard sellers are eligible for Promoted Listings. The Promotion fee is charged based on a percentage (1-20%) of the sale price after a purchase has been made.
- Seller Hub Promotions: Seller Hub Promotions are a set of tools that are available to eBay store subscribers for free. These promotions allow you to improve your listing performance by creating offers that reward buyers for being loyal to your brand.
eBay Fulfillment Automation
You’ve promoted your listings and gotten a sale. Now, what? You need to fulfill the order by shipping the item to the buyer. Initially, you might be comfortable fulfilling orders by yourself but as your business grows, you may need to work with a fulfillment company to handle shipping and delivery. This helps you free up time and resources that would otherwise be taken up and focus on the other aspects of your business.
There are numerous fulfillment options that are available in the market. We’ll talk briefly about the best three.
- ShipBob: ShipBob has fulfillment centers in the United States, Canada, and Europe. They have a total of 22 domestic and 5 fulfillment centers. Their pricing model is affordable for most small and medium-sized businesses. Their storage fees are a bit on the higher end, so sellers that sell slow-moving stock might want to consider other options.
- eFulfillment Service: eFulfillment offers a free 30-day trial which allows you to test their service before paying for it. eFulfillment provides integrations with several e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Etsy. eFulfillment only has one warehouse, so it might not be the right option for you if you ship globally.
- Fulfillify: Fulfillify is popular among e-commerce retailers for its ease of use and setup. It offers both two-day and same-day pick, pack, and ship services. Their fees are some of the lowest among fulfillment service companies. However, if you ship bulky products regularly, Fulfillify might not be the best fit.
You can read more about these fulfillment service companies here.
Inventory Management Automation
Your success as a retailer not only depends on the number of goods you sell. It also depends on how well you track the movement of stock from your supplier to the buyer. Inventory management doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming.
A spreadsheet might suffice in the early stages but after a while, you are going to require dedicated inventory management software. These tools allow you to track and maintain inventory levels. They also often include forecasting functionality to help you predict customer demand.
Tools like Kyosou, InkFrog, eBay’s own Selling Manager Pro, Zoho Inventory, and Sellbrite can help you streamline and automate the inventory management process across multiple platforms. You can read more about eBay inventory management here.
eBay Feedback Automation
Fulfillment isn’t where e-commerce ends. Rather, in a lot of cases, it’s where e-commerce begins. After successful delivery, you need to be ready to perform any after-sales service that the customer may require. If they have any questions, you should be ready to answer them quickly and respectfully to avoid a negative feedback.
eBay allows you to leave automatic feedback for buyers. You can turn on this feature by navigating to the “All listings and orders” section in the Selling Preferences page.
Choose “Edit” next to Automate Feedback and select Automatically leave positive feedback. Choose when the system should leave feedback – after payment or after the buyer has left feedback.
Once this setting is selected, the system will choose a random positive response from the default options available to send them to your customers.
If you don’t want the default responses, you can edit them and add yours.
Also, you can click here for some free eBay message templates you can use to get more positive feedback.
Automation can be quite powerful and all-encompassing. You should expect to automate some, if not most, of the processes in your supply chain, from product research right to order fulfillment.
Automation done right can increase your sales figures and help you establish your brand. Automation done wrong can put you in a quick fix. It is important to control bulk actions and implement one facet of automation at a time. Slow and steady really does win the race.
FAQ
Does eBay Turbo Lister still work?
No. The listing tool was discontinued by eBay in 2020, after nearly twenty years of service. The tool still works and runs offline but no longer has the ability to upload listings to eBay.
What is the Cassini algorithm?
The Cassini ranking system was developed as eBay’s replacement for the Voyager search engine in 2013. It allowed listings to be ranked based on their relevance to the search query, rather than the presence of keywords.