random thoughts on business

This weekend our online team rolled out new features for the Online Sales feature of Office Accounting.

 The first one that is not visibile but functional is that you now retain your data when you save the item details even if you don't listed; previously the data was only saved if the item was listed on eBay.

 The second one was highly requested and it is a rich format description editor, so here it is! Just click on Rich Formatting link on the description box and you'll be taken to a full featured rich format and html editor, check it out:

Then now we have the ability to remember templates, so details you previously listed on a specific category will load up if you select the checkbox on the category selection window:

And finally now the Listing ID appears with a link at the end of the listing process, so you won't have to go to see your listing report to see your listings.

Alright, so I'll start with the news that the response for the product has been amazing, when the product launched it was hot deal in www.slickdeals.net and in a matter of hours the download service was so packed we had to reengineer the packaging (compression) to make it a smaller download since there was a higher demand than the expected! In a few days the expectations were overpassed by probably 1000% (seriously)... Today we are seeing numbers we didn't expect to see.

I was looking at the Manage Online Sales part of the feature and I was wondering if it was necessary to make a post about it, but I think it's so intuitive that it makes little or no sense to explain any of it. I'd really recommend new users to read through my setup posting before setting their company though if they are new to selling online.

Now going forward I know there will be new updates coming for the service and the client, I can't tell yet when they'll be available but I can say it will be soon, we are putting a lot of attention on your feedback (newsgroups, blogs, customer support, news, reviews, etc) so don't hesitate to say what you like and what you dislike about the product.

Finally, I'd like to mention that the other day I received an email comenting on an article published on Fortune Small Business that it said something like:

 But Microsoft’s Marketplace Services environment is leagues ahead of the Marketing Tools for QuickBooks page, which feels as if it were tossed together in a few hours by a heavily caffeinated Google intern.

LOL.

Last time I went through setting up online sales… Today… Is listing time!

To do so, you first must have at least one item account that you want to list on eBay, Express version only supports non-inventory and service item types, if you want to keep track of inventory then you will have to get the Professional version, if you want to try out the pro version the trial keys should be available any time soon.

Once you have setup an item you want to sell, you have many places to start from, it can be from the Online Sales Bucket by clicking on List Items  Online in the flow diagram, on the menu or simply by right clicking on the item you want to sell, this will open a new window to select the item to list (if you did it with a right click the item will be automatically selected).

On the next screen you will get to choose a marketplace to list items to, currently is only eBay, so you can click Next.

Here you will see the an overview of the items you want to list, click on the Edit link to open up the details window.

The details window is divided on 2 sections, in the panel on the left you can type in a name (you can leave the same name or change it, this won’t affect the mapping to your Office Accouting item), subtitle (The green $ means that you’ll get charged extra if you want to use that additional feature, the * means that is a required field), select a Category where your item fits in, type in a description (this field gets also pulled from your item description on Office Accounting and supports HTML), a starting price and a quantity. You can optionally upload images to your product listing.

Note that the screenshot above shows the listing type as Fixed Price, as I mentioned on the previous post, you will need to setup your eBay account to support Fixed Price/Buy it now if you want to use this feature.

On the right side of the screen you’ll see several tabs, we’ll go one by one.

The first tab is the Shipping and taxes tab, here you select what shipping options you want to offer to your customers, this is a completely optional tab.

The second tab is the Locations tab, here the only required field is the location of your item, you can type anything it, usually the city and/or state your item is in; you can also select what destinations you are willing to ship to.

The third tab is the Payment tab, in this tab you can choose what types of payments you want to accept, if you setup a Paypal account (see my previous post on how to setup online sales), this is where you put it in.

And the last tab are upgrades you can do to your listing, these are a wide range of offerings from eBay, checkout this page to see some examples:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/ia/promoting_your_item.html

Finally click on Save to go back to the listing details page, if you filled in all the required fields you will see that the icon of the status changes from Needs detail to Ready for listing.

Finally click on List and you’ll be taken to a confirmation of your listing.

Where did your listing go? Pretty simple, go to Manage Online Sales on the Online Sales Bucket and you’ll see all the listings you’ve done, you can click on the listing number to open an internet explorer with your listing.

The next time you want to list the same item, the required fields will be automatically filled, you want to double check on the rest of the options to make sure the listing has all the things the way you want it.

When your item is purchased, you’ll be able to download it by clicking Download Orders and Fees. It will come down as an Online Order (similar to a Sales Order), if it was checked out by the user you can now convert it to Online Sales Receipt (similar to a Cash Sale), this process (the conversion) will do the postings to your accounts.

That is it about this introduction, I hope this helped!

We finally released the Express version of Office Accounting 2007 and one of the cool new features is also one of the features I worked on: Online Sales.

Even though many of us have already bought stuff from eBay (who can forget the first time we bid on our first “it”?), some of us have never sold a thing in it… Well, it might be the time to give it a try.

In the Office Accounting team we have made a great effort to add this functionality to our product, the feature team worked hard hours and got into big discussions (believe me) about the feature and how it should work, it is nice to see it out now and this is my post to explain what you will need to put your antique, collectible or new product (have you checked out our website: www.ideawins.com?) on the largest online marketplace on earth.

First of all, download the product from the www.ideawins.com, install it and create a new company… You don’t have a company yet? What are you waiting for?

After setting up a company, checkout the product itself, some reviewer found the pop-ups annoying, I understand they are, but don’t worry, after they show up for a second time, they show a little checkbox to Not show them again, so, be patient you’ll get rid of them soon.

Ok, by now  you kind of know how the product works… Are you ready for eBay?

Only if you have the accounts necessary, if you don’t, this is what this post is about… Explaining what you need and why you need it.

Windows Live ID Account.

First of all, you’ll need a Windows Live ID account (also known as Passport). If you have an existing email you want to use, go to www.passport.com and register it, if you don’t, you can open a hotmail (www.hotmail.com) account which is automatically a Windows Live ID account.

A second thing you want is an eBay seller account, yes, not a buyer, a seller…  Go to www.ebay.com and register for an account, you’ll use a credit card to validate your identity and then they will send you an email to validate your email address; after you’re done with that, continue and go to My eBay and find  the link that reads “Start Selling!” on the left panel, here you will find that you have 2 things to do: Create a paypal account (to receive payments through paypal) and create a seller account on eBay.

Paypal Account (Optional).

Paypal is a commonly used payment system on eBay, they basically charge the transactions to your buyers and deposit the money in the account you specify. Visit www.paypal.com and setup an account if you wish you use this payment method, it is highly recommended.

Ebay Seller Account.

When you click on the Start Selling! Link on eBay you will find a link to “Sell your item”, click on that and it will take you to a wizard to setup your seller account, you will need a credit card account and a bank account, they will let you choose how to pay your selling fees (Don’t worry, if you don’t post anything for sale they don’t charge anything to your account).

Buy it now (Optional).

eBay was born as a site where you could auction items and sell your stuff to the highest bidder, later they introduced a “buy it now” feature (or Fixed Price) which gives you the possibility to establish a price that you are willing to accept for your item without having to wait for the auction to end, basically the traditional method of selling things, to enable this feature you must do an extra verification step. Go to http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fixed_price.html and follow their instructions to enable this on your account.

Now you have all you need to start selling online using Office Accounting 2007, open the company you created and click on the Online Sales Bucket, then click on Setup to Sell Online.

Login with your Windows Live ID, provide your contact details, read and accept the terms of service (only if you do accept them, don’t do it because I say so :P)… Then you’ll get to the setup process, here is a basic explanation of each page of the wizard, I would recommend you to read this information before you finish doing this process since some processing will occur on our servers once you hit on finish. I’ll mark some options as newbie recommended.

Step 1. Sign into eBay.

Here is where you provide your seller account info, no rocket science here.

Step 2. Manage order downloads.

If you are new to eBay, choose the first option: Only orders for items listed on eBay using Office Accounting 2007 (newbie recommended).

If you were a previous seller on eBay (and didn’t need any of the info mentioned above) and you want to download the items you have sold before, select the option: Orders for all items listed on eBay. Then select a date since when you want to download these orders, note that because of eBay limitations you can only choose 3 months back.

Step 3. Manage Items.

What will happen the day that Office Accounting downloads an item that you do not have mapped to an item account (usually because it was listed outside Office Accounting) on your application? Choose to track unrecognized items individually (newbie recommended) so you can choose which item to map it to, or choose track unrecognized items as one item (maybe you have thousands of sales that you made outside Office Accounting and you don’t want to map one by one).

Step 4. Manage Customers.

Do you want to create a customer per every different customer you sell to? Or do you want to keep all your online sales to a single generic customer? I would say track individual customers if your market is eBay, but if you have an established business and just wants to add selling power to your business, maybe you just want to track all your online sales to a single customer, that way you won’t have a huge mix of virtual and real customers on your customer account list, to do this use Do not track individual customers.

Step 5. Manage shipping and insurance.

This is where accounting begins on this feature, here you have to select what accounts will track your shipping and additional charges income. The default should be fine for newbies (newbie recommended).

Step 6. Manage Payment Methods.

When you download your orders, where is the money going to? Depending on how people pay to you, you can choose a bank or cash account. Defaults are ok if you want all the money to be deposited into a single account, but here I would recommend you to create your own, maybe a Paypal Bank account for Paypal payments, leave the checks to Undeposited Funds (since you will probably receive them by mail and have to deposit them), etc.

Step 6. (second part: Fees).

Since not everything in this world is free, only the best of it (Office Accounting Express for example) eBay will charge you a small portion of fees for every listing and sale you make, the same for paypal, if you want to keep track of these fees choose the option to download them. One quick note here is that if you sale with paypal, they will automatically deduct the fees from the money they collect for you, so I would recommend you to at least download fees for paypal, these will come down to your application as paid cash sales, eBay fees in the other hand will be charged to the account you provided when you were setting your seller account and they will download as unpaid bills.

You are all set, finish and close the wizard and get ready to list items on eBay.

Wow, I didn’t realize how big this post would be, I hope it’s helpful, specially to newbies, please leave your comments and questions about setting up your account, I’d be happy to answer them.

I will soon post again about listing items; it should be pretty easy from here on.

Alright, this is my first post... A disclaimer!

This is a small space to talk about basically anything that comes into my mind. Obviously, since it is on MSDN and I work at Microsoft I will be sharing things that are of interest to people in technology, specially but not limited to the business area.

I'm Isaias Formacio a Software Design Engineer in Test for Microsoft working on a product known as Small Business Accounting (thus my blog's name).

Remember, the things I post here are my personal thoughts. I am not representing Microsoft, nor Microsoft's opinion, nor Microsoft's interest... And finally, these postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights.