random thoughts on business

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!