True, as a buyer, you'll find that your My eBay pages are a great resource for shopping on eBay. You can use them to track your activity, watch items that you plan to bid on, and save your favorite searches and sellers for future bids, amongst other things.
As a seller, the effectiveness of My eBay really depends on how many things you have for sale at any given time. After all, My eBay can show only a limited number of current auctions and pending transactions at a time, and it doesn't offer any clear visualizations of how well you're doing and what your total revenue is, nor does it collect the most commonly used eBay tools into a single place for your convenience.
Selling Manager/Selling Manager Pro Benefits
For medium-to-high volume sellers, eBay therefore offers Selling Manager, essentially an enhancement to My eBay that any seller can purchase for a small monthly fee that changes My eBay to also offer the following:- Visualization of your performance. Though it's obviously still a good idea to record and chart your own progress using a spreadsheet or other bookkeeping technique, Selling Manager offers a basic visual view of your success, plotting your recent revenue performance as a chart.
- Seller dashboard at a glance. Selling Manager also prominently places your seller dashboard in your My eBay pages for continuual reference as you use eBay and transact on an ongoing basis, without having to constantly check your status specifically.
- Summaries and quick-access breakdowns of your activity. You get quick access to all of your listings by time remaining, bids, offers, questions, listings about to start, those sold and unsold and/or those eligible for free relisting, as well as completed auctions similarly broken down along a number of axes, like those awaiting payment, those eligible for combined shipping, those currently in disputes and even breakdowns of disputed items according to the dispute status.
- Quick links to important tools. Cross-promotion tools, shipping tools, auction management tools, and others are directly linked from your My eBay page in a fully customizable list of important eBay tool links.
- Send bulk email to your buyers. Announcements, deals, coupons, and other things can be sent to buyers automatically, directly to the address that they have on file for eBay trading.
- Remember feedback comments so that you can leave them quickly. Rather than having to enter feedback over and over again, Selling Manager makes it possible to "save" the feedback that you like to leave and to leave it in the future with a simple click.
- Download spreadsheet-ready activity summaries. Selling Manager also offers the ability to download, on a monthly basis (as well as for the previous three months) your eBay trading as a spreadsheet-ready file summarizing various kinds of activity according to your directions.
Though none of these enhancements to My eBay is enough on its own to merit a monthly subscription fee, as a combined package they make Selling Manager a valuable service for sellers at medium-to-high volume levels, especially given the relatively low monthly cost to use the service in comparison to the time and hassle savings.
In addition to the benefits offered above, Selling Manager Pro offers everything that Selling Manager does, but, as a general rule, makes possible the automation of your eBay selling. For example:
- Automatic feedback for buyers. Leave feedback automatically after payment has been received or after payment and positive feedback have been received, your choice.
- Automatic email communication with buyers. Rather than having to keep up communication by hand, you can maintain good seller communication ratings by automatically sending winning bid, payment received, shipment, and other notifications.
- Automatic listings according to your preferences. Selling Manager Pro can be configured to list items automatically from a list of inventory items that you create according to rules that you also create—things like maintaining a given number of listings active (i.e. list a new one whenever an old one finishes or is completed) or listing regularly on a given schedule, amongst other options.
Subscribing to Selling Manager/Selling Manager Pro
To subscribe to Selling Manager or Selling Manager Pro, visit one of the following two eBay links:In either case, subscribing will cause the montly fee for the Selling Manager option you've chosen to be added to your eBay seller invoice every month. After subscribing, Selling Manager or Selling Manager Pro will immediately become active on your My eBay page (you will find it to be transformed upon your next login) and within a few hours all data and charts will appear on the page with current data.
Unsubscribing from Selling Manager/Selling Manager Pro
To cancel your Selling Manager subscription at any time, follow these steps:- Click on the "My eBay" link at the upper-right of any eBay page.
- Scroll down until you see the heading "My Account" in the left-hand column of the page.
- Click "Subscriptions" to open the subscriptions page.
- At the top of the subscriptions page, under the heading "Active subscriptions," click on the "Cancel subscription" link to the far right of the "Selling Manager" entry.
Using Selling Manager
If you're ready to take advantage of eBay's current "30 day free trials" for Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro (visit their respective home pages above), you can explore their functionality and see whether or not you think they might be just the tool for you.To help you to make this decision, you may want to look at a list of step-by-step instructions for using selling manager and some of its various features.
