AW Daily - Tips & Tactics - Before the Auction: Starting an Auction Business

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Before the Auction: Starting an Auction Business continued ...

Incoming Inventory
If you are buying inventory for resale, request that sellers and suppliers deliver it on a specific day. This affords time for prelisting activities, such as measuring, gathering source materials, taking photos, and writing descriptions. It is also wise to create a separate database for your inventory independent of your auction database. This way, you'll have a catalog of your items for reference during and after sales.

For this very purpose, online inventory management tools have been added to best of breed online auction management services. For example, AW's inventory management solution enables sellers to keep all of their inventory information cued online for immediate listing through Auction Manager. Here, sellers can keep records of their auctions, manage inventory using folders, preview their inventory, and launch auctions right from the inventory area to eBay, Yahoo Auctions, and Amazon.com Auctions.

Product Descriptions
If you sell the same type of item often, you can save time by writing a general description which can be pasted directly into the auction's item description field. You can then easily modify the specifics of the description so it applies to that particular item. If you auction many different items on a regular basis, consider staggering the listing of similiar items so that you don't saturate the market and limit your results.

Also of note: AW's Auction Manager Pro v2.0 now lets sellers set defaults for the repeating information (i.e., your product descriptions) that goes into their listings on eBay, Yahoo Auctions, Amazon.com Auctions, via the Profile Manager.

Email
Use a dependable, full-featured email program, such as Eudora, Microsoft Outlook, or AW's Mail and Calendar service, which is integrated into Auction Manager, so that you can filter emails from buyers into preset mailboxes. This way you can quickly service your buyers' needs. Keep all emails from buyers until you have received positive feedback from the sale. Also create mailboxes for your own end-of-auction notices, invoices, payment confirmations, and shipment notifications.

Create templates for all email communications, such as your EOA notification, which should be sent the day or day after your auction closes. Of course, if you use an online auction management service, such as Auction Manager, that offers an automated post sale component, it will likely send out EOA notifications automatically.

Outgoing Inventory
As a rule, pick separate days to pack and ship all the items that sold during the week, such as Tuesday/Wednesday and Friday/Saturday. Make this schedule clear to your buyers in your auctions and email communications. This will save you time and prevent unnecessary trips to the post office. Also, as a rule, require your customers to pay mail insurance on more valuable items. And if you accept payment by check, state up front in your sales policy if checks must clear before you'll ship. (See Formulating a Sales Policy.) Finally, if you intend to sell in high volumes, consider buying a postal scale with which you can weigh your packages. For the sake of efficiency, you might also consider renting a digital postal meter so you know exactly what to charge your customers.

Hard Copies
Create a system of hard folders in which you can file important paperwork generated from your auctions, such as copies of your end-of-auction notices, hard invoices, and postal and insurance receipts. It is also wise to staple receipts to any paperwork relating to that auction.

Customer Relations
Last but not least, online merchants and high-volume auction sellers have begun to embrace direct marketing to reach out to their existing customers and increase sales. With that in mind, AW has debuted a Customer Management tool, which enables sellers to create an online contact database and send targeted sales emails to buyers that have previously bid on their merchandise. For more information, check out AW's Customer Management How To Use page.

Getting Licensed
Creating a Sales Policy
Reporting Auction Income