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.
