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Pareto's principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of effort.  You can apply that to business, relationships, jobs, just about everything in life and eBay is no difference.  Pareto's principle, as it applies to business suggests that you should focus the bulk of your marketing efforts on the most profitable 20% of your customers.  If you were an eBay seller that sold a large amount of items in the same niche frequently, you may be able to benefit from this strategy.

How To Get A List Of Your Buyers
Getting a list of your buyers for a period of time can be easy if you are using good auction management software.  eBay's own Selling Manager Pro allows you to download all your customers as a .CSV file which contains their email addresses, eBay username and total price they paid for items.  

This is a screenshot from Marketplace Advisor, which has a reporting tool that enables you to download all your sales for a specified period of time and includes the same information as eBay's Selling Manager Pro report does.   

How To Find The Most Profitable 20%

1. Open your CSV file in Excel then select all your data
2. Scroll down to the bottom to see how many customers you have total.  For this example, I have 620
3. Go to Data -> PivotTable & PivotChart Wizard make sure Microsoft Excel list or database is checked, as well as PivotTable Report, then click Next
4. Click Next again after it asks what data you want to use.  You should have already selected it in step 1. 
5. On the next step, make sure New Worksheet selected, then click Finish.
6. That should bring you to the following screen, after which you need to drag the email/eBay username field into the column that says "Drop Row Fields Here" and the Auction field into the "Drop Data Items Here" section.
   
7. Now the Pivot Table should be showing you an alphabetical list of your buyers along with the total quantity of items they've ordered from you.  Double-click your email/eBay Username field, which brings up the PivotTable field. 
8. Click Advanced
   
9. Now you need to set AutoSort options to "Descending" and "Using Field" to "Count of auction" so that it shows you the customers who've purchased the most number of items first.  Then set Top 10 AutoShow to On and change the number from 10 to whatever 20% of your total number of customers is.  In my case, it's 124.
   
   
   Note: If you have customers at the bottom of your list who have ordered the same number of items, it will display all of them, even if that number is more than you set the Top 10 AutoShow to.  For example, even though I set it to show the top 124 (20%) customers, it actually gave me 221 because there were so many customers that ordered 2 items from me.  In this situation, you'd want to decrease the Top 10 AutoShow number to a smaller number so you have a smaller group of customers that is closer to the 20% we are looking for. 
   
   Pareto's principle can sometimes be closer to 90/10 instead of 80/20.  By the looks of my numbers, changing my Top 10 Autoshow number to 62 (10% instead of 20%), that gives me 76 customers who have ordered 4 or more items which is more along the lines of what we're looking for here. 
10. Now your spreadsheet should look like this:
    

Now you should look these customers up in your records or auction management software to see their ordering history. 

What To Do With The Most Profitable 20%
Now that you know which of your customers buy the most, you should look them up in your records or auction management software to see their ordering history.  Look at the individual products they bought and see if you can find a common theme.  Maybe they buy a certain size, color, artist or genre from you.  See if you can get to know their taste so that when you get a new product that is similar to what they have bought before, you can email them personally and let them know about the new product.  Of course, if you could find a way to automate it Amazon-style, that would be even better and I would love to hear about it.  

Also consider creating a special email filter for these people so that whenever they email you with a problem of question, you make sure to pay extra attention to them.  If you review your top 20% every month, you'll find that adjusting your VIP customer marketing email filter only takes a few minutes because you are only changing a handful of names. 

If you're a seller on eBay who sells many of the same item week after week, you might be wondering how you can best take advantage of eBay's occasional discount listing days.  The other day was 10 cent listing day, courtesy of Monster.com.  Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to write this post until now, so you're going to have to remember this for the next time 10 cent listing day comes around.

Up until recently, despite my years of eBay experience, I never really understood how to fully take advantage of eBay's discounted listing days.  I just sat back and enjoyed my discount on the stuff that I was already going to list that day anyways, not realizing the full potential of discount listing days.  I'm sure that what I'm about to talk about is obvious to many eBay sellers, but it wasn't for me and that's why I'm sharing it.

The most straightforward way to take advantage of discounted listing days is to simply list more items.  This doesn't really apply to sellers that only list a handful of unique items every week, unfortunately.  The sellers that gain the most benefit from discounted listing days are those that sell dozens or hundreds of the same items week after week.  Sellers that sell the same DVDs, CDs, video games, books and other types of media stand to benefit the most.  These sellers typically sell hundreds of different items, but typically list them over and over because they have a supplier with a consistent inventory.  These sellers usually pick one or two days out of the week in which their items sell the best and set up their items to end all on those chosen days or they spread their listings out throughout the week. 

Calculate Your Listing Costs
The best thing to do if you're a seller like this is to calculate what it would normally cost you to list your items and then calculate the difference between what it costs on a discounted listing day.  For example, if you're selling new CDs whose prices are between $9.99 and $24.99, you're paying $0.55 per listing.  If you had multiple copies of 200 CDs available to sell, it would cost you $110 on a regular listing day.  On 10 cent listing day, it would only cost $20, a savings of $90.  So now the question is, what do you do with those savings?

How to Capitalize on the Savings
The most straightforward way to capitalize on the savings is to list your set of 200 CDs multiple times with different ending times and days.  For example, if you normally have your CDs set to 7 day auctions that end on Sundays, and 10 cent listing day fell on a Tuesday like it did this time, you could set up a 7 day duration set that would end next Tuesday as well as a 3 day duration set that ends on Friday.  Maybe you have tested 3 day listings that end on Fridays and 7 day listings that end on Tuesdays and it didn't work out so well so you stopped doing it, but with listing costs of only $20, it's hard not to make a profit on 200 CDs when the risk is only $20.  So we've used up $40 of our $90 savings, now what do we do with the rest? 

You could also test another set of CDs as a 5 day auction to end alongside your set that was scheduled to end on Sunday but at a different time.  For example, if you normally have your auctions close between 5PM and 9PM, you could test another set to end between 11AM and 4PM.  You might find that 11AM to 4PM has a higher success rate than 5PM and 9PM and can then adjust your listings next week to reflect your new discovery.

Maybe you've been wanting to try a different auction template or some different ad copy but are hesitant to test because you don't want to risk the cost of the auctions because it might not work.  10 cent listing day makes it easy to test because you're only risking $20 instead of $110. 

By launching 3, 5 and 7 day sets on 10 cent listing day, as well as testing different ad copy or a new template, you've affectively listed four times as many auctions for $30 less than you would have on another day, allowing you to try new ideas you've been thinking about as well as basically giving you free money because if your listing success rate on Sundays is good enough to make a profit with $110 listing fees, it's almost certainly good enough to make a profit when your cost of listing is only $20.

So there you have it, now you can fully take advantage of eBay's next discount listing day!

Right now I was checking eBay UK because I was going to cancel my subscription to Vendio in favor of using eBay's Selling Manager Pro auction management system and I was greeted with the big fat image above.  It would appear that eBay wants to remind its UK buyers that they can get goods for a fairly steep discount by importing from other countries because of the conversion rate between British Pounds (GBP) and Euros, and US Dollars (USD).  Right now, the exchange rate of dollars to pounds is 1:1.975 according to XE.  That means that the pound is worth nearly twice the dollar.

What does this mean for eBay sellers?  For both sellers that sell as a hobby and those who sell for a living, it means that they could be missing out on a significant source of revenue.  It's very common on eBay to see a seller's auction description with the following: "NO INTERNATIONAL BIDDERS!"  But if you stop to think about it, that US-centric mindset could be costing you money. 

Here are some reasons that many sellers are reluctant to sell internationally:

• Increased cost of shipping
• Increase risk of lost shipments due to lack of tracking tools
• Fear of negative feedback due to lost shipments
• Having to fill out customs forms is intimidating
• Credit card fraud in certain countries is rampant

Fortunately each of these has a solution. Read More »