The more SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) you sell, the more confusing the storing and packing of all those items can get. As you build your eBay business, the little side table you use for storing eBay merchandise isn’t going to work anymore (and I know you’ll want your dining room back). You need to begin to think industrial. Even part-time sellers can benefit by adding professional touches to their business organization.
In this chapter, I emphasize the importance of setting up and organizing your back office. I cover everything from stacking your stock to keeping inventory to getting those indispensable packing materials and saving time by buying postage online. Organization will be your byword. Dive right in. The sooner you read this chapter, the sooner you can organize your eBay back office and get down to business.
The Warehouse: Organizing Your Space
Whether you plan to sell large or small items, you need space for storing them. As you make savvy purchases, maintaining an item’s mint condition will be one of your greatest challenges. In this section, I cover the details of what you’ll need to safeguard your precious stock.
Shelving your profits
Before you stock the shelves, it helps to have some! You also need a place to put the shelves: your garage, a spare room, or somewhere else. For the home-based business, you have a choice between two basic kinds of shelves:
Plastic: If you’re just starting out, you can always go to the local closet-and-linen-supply store to buy inexpensive plastic shelves. They’re light and cheap, but they’ll buckle in time.
Steel: If you want to do it right the first time, buy steel shelving. The most versatile steel shelving is the wire kind (versus solid steel shelves), which is light and allows air to circulate around your items. Steel wire shelving assembles easily; I put mine together without help. You can combine steel-wire shelving units to create a full wall of shelves. Each shelf safely holds as much as 600 pounds of merchandise.
To save you time, I researched the subject and found some readily available, reasonably priced shelves. Just go to Target or Costco and look for Seville Classics four-shelf commercial shelving, sold in 36- and 48-inch-wide units. Seville Classics also has an eBay store where you can buy from them direct. Look for them at
You can easily convert a garage or a spare room to a professional and functional stock room. Figure 1-1 shows a portion of my stock area.
FIGURE 1-1: A portion of my merchandise storage area.
Box ’em or bag ’em?
Packing your items for storage can be a challenge. For smaller items, pick up plastic bags in sandwich, quart, and gallon sizes. When items are stored in plastic, they can’t pick up any smells or become musty before you sell them. The plastic also protects the items from rubbing against each other and causing possible damage. If you package them one item to a bag, you can then just grab one off the shelf and put it directly into a shipping box when a listing sells.
Your bags of items will have to go into boxes for storage on the shelves. Clear plastic storage boxes, the kind you often find at superstores, are great for bulky items. They’re usually 26 inches long, so before you buy these big plastic containers, make sure that they’ll fit on your shelving comfortably and that you’ll have easy access to your items. Smaller see-through plastic boxes with various compartments (such as the type home-improvement stores carry for storing tools) work great for storing very small items.
Using cardboard office-type file storage boxes from an office supply store is another option. These cardboard boxes are 10 x 12 x 16 inches, which is a nice size for storing medium-size products. At around $1 each, they’re the most economical choice. The downside is that you can’t see through cardboard boxes, so if your label falls off, you have to take the box off the shelf and open it to check its contents. The upside is that they are inexpensive.
When using these large plastic bins, it’s always a good idea to tape a pad of Post-it® notes on the end of the box so you can quickly identify the contents. For more advanced users, how about using a Dymo label maker to re-create the bar code as well as the product name? That way you can scan the code when you remove an item to keep track of inventory.
Speaking of bins, Figure 1-2 shows you the bins in the small-parts area of the warehouse of an eBay seller. His setup isn’t exactly what the home seller will need, but it sometimes helps to see how larger sellers do it.
FIGURE 1-2: Nice, organized little bins of products at this eBay business.
Keeping Track of What You Have
Savvy sellers have different methods of handling inventory. They use everything from spiral-bound notebooks to sophisticated software programs. Although computerized inventory tracking can simplify this task, starting with a plain ol’ handwritten ledger is fine, too. Choose whichever works best for you, but keep in mind that as your eBay business grows, a software program that tracks inventory for you may become necessary.
Most of these systems wouldn’t work for a company with a warehouse full of stock — but will work nicely in an eBay sales environment. Many sellers tape sheets of paper to their boxes to identify them by number, and use that as a reference to a simple Excel spreadsheet for selling purposes. Excel spreadsheets are perfect for keeping track of your listings as well, but if you’re using a management service or software, you don’t need both for physical inventory.
You may also want to use Excel spreadsheets for your downloaded PayPal statements, to hold information waiting to transfer to your bookkeeping program. I post my sales each time I make a PayPal withdrawal (a couple of times a week). I keep the PayPal downloads only for archival purposes.
When you’re running a full-time business, however, you have to keep Uncle Sam happy with a dollars-and-cents accounting of your inventory, so keep your inventory records in a standardized program such as QuickBooks (discussed in Book 9, Chapter 3). I describe a variety of auction-management software and websites, many of which include physical inventory tracking features.
In my eBay business, I keep my inventory record in QuickBooks. Each time I purchase merchandise for my business, I post it in the program. When I post my sales each week, QuickBooks automatically deducts the sold items from my inventory. I then do a physical inventory as product stock runs low.
The Shipping Department: Packin’ It Up
In this section, I review some of the things you might have for a complete, smooth-running shipping department, such as cleaning supplies and packing materials. The handling fee portion of your shipping charges pays for these kinds of items. Don’t run low on them — and pay attention to how you store them. They must be kept in a clean environment.
Pre-packaging clean up
Be sure the items you send out are in tip-top shape. Here are a few everyday chemicals that can gild the lily:
WD-40: This decades-old lubricant works very well at getting price stickers off plastic and glass without damaging the product. And if the plastic on a toy box begins to look nasty — even when stored in a clean environment — a quick wipe with a paper towel and a dash of WD-40 will make it shine like new. It also works well for untangling jewelry chains and shining up metallic objects.
Goo Gone: Goo Gone works miracles in cleaning up gooey sticker residue from nonporous items.
Vamoose: Is there a smoker in your house? Cigar or cigarette smoke can permeate most items. Vamoose is a chemical miracle that totally removes these stale, smoky smells. Read up about it on the web at www.vamooseproducts.com and find it in their eBay store at
un-du Adhesive Remover: This amazing liquid easily removes stickers off cardboard, plastic, fabrics, and more without causing damage. It comes packaged with a patented miniscraper top that you can use in any of your sticker-cleaning projects.
Packing materials
The most important area where sellers drop the time-and-money ball is in shipping. I buy hundreds of items from eBay and have seen it all when it comes to packing, padding, and shipping. I’ve seen money thrown out the window by ecommerce retailers who used incorrect packing materials; too often the wrong stuff is expensive in the first place, and increases the final weight of the package — and shipping cost.
The packing materials that you use for your shipments can either make or break your bottom line in the Shipping Income/Expense column of your business reports.
Prudent packing can be a boon to your business because having lower shipping costs can often make the difference between a profit and none (and offering free shipping affects your position in eBay’s search). This is especially true when several people have the same item up for sale, with a minuscule difference in the item’s selling price. Hint: Free shipping always wins.
Pay attention to packing. It’s only expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can ship your items in quality packing, keep buyers happy, and look forward to positive feedback.
Buying your shipping materials online is very economical. eBay shipping-supply e-tailers make their living selling online. Their overhead is much lower than that of any retail outlet. Even after paying shipping to get the bubble wrap to your door, you save money and time. Most of these sellers ship the same day they get your order.
Using void fill
Nope! Void fill is not a new drug to prevent hunger pangs when dieting. Void fill is the industry term for the stuff you use to fill up space in shipping boxes to keep items from rolling in transit. (It’s really the modern term for the old-fashioned word dunnage.)
There are many forms of void fill, and the best kind depends on the item you’re shipping. Here are the most popular types, and a description of their pluses and minuses.
So that you can always be sure that your items will arrive at their destinations in one piece, you’ll want to keep the following on hand at all times:
Air packing pillows: I found out about these nifty little pillows because they seem to come in packages from all the major online stores. I store them as they come in — in my packing area — and recycle them in my outgoing packages.
Buying air packing pillows from sellers on eBay is economical, mainly because the manufacturing and shipping costs are low. What these folks are essentially shipping you is 99 percent air (something the post office hasn’t yet figured out how to charge for). You can find air pillows in the Business and Industrial category. Some sellers sell the uninflated pillows with a small hand-size air pump to fill the pillows.
Air packing pillows are perfect for filling in the area around smaller boxed items that you want to double-box. They are also handy if you have breakables that you’ve prewrapped in bubble wrap; just use the pillows to fill out the box. They’re crushproof and can support about 150 pounds without a blowout.
I purchase household items from Amazon on a subscription basis. Amazon sends me tons of air packing pillows and I reuse them in my outgoing eBay packages.
Bubble wrap: Made up of air-filled cushions of polyethylene, bubble wrap is supplied in rolls of different widths and lengths (see Figure 1-3). It shines for those who wrap delicate, breakable items. When wrapping an item with bubble wrap, wrap it one way and then the other, and then affix some packing tape to make your item an impenetrable ball. Depending on your product, you may have to carry more than one size of bubble wrap to properly protect the goods. Bubble wrap is reasonably priced (check out the many vendors on eBay) and adds next to no weight to your packages.
When you purchase bubble wrap, be sure you buy the perforated, or tear-off, kind. Cutting a giant roll of bubble wrap with a box cutter can be a dangerous proposition.
Plain old white newsprint: In the right shipping situation, plain white newsprint is fantastic. eBay sellers dealing in glass, china, and breakable knickknacks often use white newsprint to wrap each piece before placing it in a box full of packing peanuts.
White newsprint is cheap and easy to store. The bad news? It’s heavy when you use too many sheets to wrap the product. If you feel you would like to use newsprint, I suggest you buy it by the roll and use a table-mounted roll cutter to cut the exact size you need. This setup helps you to avoid using too much paper.
Packing peanuts: Every serious eBay seller has to have a stock of packing peanuts. When properly placed in a box, peanuts fill every nook and cranny and cushion your shipment to make it virtually indestructible. They’re handy for padding Tyvek envelopes and filling boxes so that items don’t shift around. A bonus: They’re cheap and if you recycle them, they don’t hurt the environment.
When packing with peanuts, the key is to not go short in the land of plenty. Use enough peanuts to fill the box completely; leaving any airspace defeats the point of using the peanuts in the first place.
Your shipping department needs just a few more items. Don’t forget to include the following at the outset of your packing career:
Plastic bags: Buy plastic bags in bulk to save money. Make sure you buy various sizes and use them for both shipping and storing. Even large kitchen or trash bags are good for wrapping up posters and large items; the plastic protects and waterproofs the item from inclement weather.
Two- or three-inch-wide shipping tape: You’ll need clear tape for securing packages and to place over address labels to protect them from scrapes and rain. I once received a package with an address label soaked with rain and barely legible. Don’t risk a lost package for want of a few inches of tape.
Hand-held tape dispenser: You need a way to get the tape off the roll and onto the box. Using a tape dispenser can be a bit tricky to the uninitiated, but once you get than hang of it, you’ll be sealing up boxes in no time flat!
Shipping in mailing envelopes
You’ll be shipping your stuff in an envelope or a box. Don’t be quick to discount shipping in envelopes. Any item under 13 ounces (15.9 ounces if you print electronic postage) can be shipped via First Class mail — and that can represent quite a savings.
Mailing envelopes come in many types of materials. Some are sturdier than others. Here’s what many eBay sellers use:
Polyvinyl envelopes: If you’ve ever ordered clothing or bedding from any of the television-shopping clubs, this is what they came in. Polyvinyl envelopes are lightweight and puncture- and tear-resistant. They are the most durable envelopes available. Who says you have to ship in boxes?
Tyvek envelopes: You know those really cool, indestructible white envelopes you get from the post office or FedEx? They’re made of DuPont Tyvek, a spun-bonded olefin fiber. Tyvek has all the benefits of vinyl envelopes, plus it breathes (allows air to reach your product) and has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than other envelope materials. (That “ratio” business means it’s very strong, yet feather-light.)
Bubble-padded mailers: These envelopes are lined with small bubbles, similar to bubble wrap. They’re great for shipping a variety of items and are the most popular with eBay sellers (see Figure 1-4).
Bubble-lined mailers come in different materials:
Plain-paper bubble mailers are the cheapest way to go, but they can be damaged in the mail if you use them to ship heavy items. The way around that problem is to wrap cheap, clear packing tape once around the envelope in each direction.
Vinyl bubble mailers aren’t expensive and are a super protective way to ship. They’re 15 percent lighter than paper bubble mailers and are water-resistant.
If you send items that can fit nicely into bubble-padded envelopes, use them. This type of envelope is perfect for mailing small items or clothing using First Class mail. The envelopes are available in quantity (an economical choice) and don’t take up much storage space. Table 1-1 shows you the industry-standard sizes of bubble envelopes and their suggested use.
FIGURE 1-4: Bubble-wrap-lined envelopes for sale from eBay seller Bubblefast.
TABLE 1-1 Standard Bubble-Padded or Poly Mailer Sizes
Size
Measurements (in Inches)
Suggested Items
#000
4 x 8
Collector trading cards, jewelry, coins
#00
5 x 10
Postcards, paper ephemera
#0
6 x 10
Doll clothes, DVDs, BluRay, video games
#1
7¼ x 12
Cardboard-sleeve VHS tapes, jewel-cased CDs and DVDs
#2
8½ x 12
Clamshell VHS tapes, books
#3
8½ x 14½
Toys, clothing, stuffed animals
#4
9½ x 14½
Small books, trade paperbacks
#5
10½ x 16
Hardcover books, dolls
#6
12½ x 19
Clothing, soft boxed items
#7
14½ x 20
Much larger packaged items, framed items, plaques
Boxing your items
Depending on the size of the items you sell, you can purchase boxes in bulk at reliable sources. Because you have a resale number, look in your local yellow pages for wholesale boxes (you still have to pay tax, but the resale number identifies you as a business and often can result in lower prices). Try to purchase from a manufacturer that specializes in B2B (business-to-business) sales. Some box companies specialize in selling to the occasional box user.
You also need to know a little about what it takes to make a sturdy box. The de facto standard for quality in general-use shipping boxes is 200-pound double-wall corrugated.
You can save big money if your items fit into boxes that the post office supplies and you plan on using Priority Mail. The U.S. Postal System (USPS) will give you all the boxes and mailing envelopes you need free, and it offers plenty of sizes. See Table 1-2 for available sizes.
FIGURE 1-5: Order shipping supplies from the USPS.
Orders can take up to a month to arrive, so be sure to order before you need more boxes.
Buying Postage Online
In 1999, the United States Postal Service announced a new service: information-based indicia (IBI) postage that you can print on envelopes and labels right from your PC. In this section, I give you the details on the two main Internet postage vendors:
You can buy postage and print your labels directly from eBay. If you have plans to sell on other platforms or your website, it may be best to have your own software on your computer.
Okay, I’m a savvy-enough consumer and businesswoman that I don’t believe in paying for extras — nor do I believe in being a victim of hidden charges. The online postage arena — while providing helpful tools that make running your eBay business easier — is fraught with bargains, deals, and introductory offers. I urge you to read these offers carefully so you know what you’re getting yourself into: Evaluate how much it will cost you to start and to maintain an ongoing relationship with the company. Although you may initially get some free hardware and pay a low introductory rate, the fine print might tell you that you’ve also agreed to pay unreasonably high monthly prices six months down the line. I always double-check pricing before getting into anything, and I urge you to do the same.
Endicia
At the beginning of PC graphics in the early ’90s, I attended a cutting-edge industry trade show. I had a successful graphics-and-advertising business, so I was interested in the latest and greatest innovations to bring my business off the light table and onto my computer. In a smallish booth were a couple of guys peddling new software that enabled artists to design direct-mail pieces from the desktop. What an innovation! Their inexpensive software even let you produce your own bar-coding for the post office. I fell in love with that software and used it throughout my graphics career.
That program (which started life as DAZzle and now wears the Endicia brand), combined with the originators’ patented Dial-A-Zip, became the basis for today’s software that is distributed to all Endicia customers. There isn’t a more robust mailing program on the market.
Endicia has all the features of PayPal shipping and more:
Buy your postage online: With a click of your mouse, you can purchase your postage instantly using your credit card or by direct debit from your checking account. You can register your preferences when you sign up with Endicia, and you get a Packaging Advisor, as shown in Figure 1-6.
Print postage for all classes of mail, including international: From Anniston, Alabama, to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the DAZzle software not only prints postage but also lists all your shipping options and applicable rates. For international mailing, it also advises you as to any prohibitions (for example, no prison-made goods can be mailed to Botswana), restrictions, necessary customs forms, and areas served within the country.
Print customs forms: You no longer have to go to the post office with your international packages. Just print the customs form from the Endicia shipping software and give the package to your letter carrier.
Print prepaid return labels: Should you need to accept a return from a customer, you can send them a prepaid label. Professional accounts can print Pay-on-Use Returns™ labels which are not pre-paid. Postage is only deducted from your postage account if and when the return label is scanned in the mailstream.
Mailpiece design: Endicia Internet postage is based on the original DAZzle, which was already an award-winning mailpiece design tool that lets you design envelopes, postcards, and labels with color graphics, logos, pictures, text messages, and rubber stamps. You can print your mailing label with postage and delivery confirmation on anything from plain paper (tape it on with clear tape) to fancy 4 x 6 labels in a label printer from an extensive list of label templates.
Integration with insurance: If you’re saving time and money using U-PIC (a private package insurer — see Chapter 3 in this minibook) or Endicia’s own insurance, you can send your monthly insurance logs electronically at the end of the month — a service integrated into the Endicia shipping software. There’s no need to print a hard copy and mail in this information.
No cut-and-paste necessary: Endicia software integrates with most common software programs. With Endicia shipping software open on your computer, highlight the buyer’s address from an email or the PayPal site and then press Ctrl+C. The address automatically appears in the Endicia postage software. No pasting needed.
FIGURE 1-6: Endicia offers a Packaging Advisor that checks for the lowest shipping rates.
Endicia offers two levels of service. All the features just listed come with the Premium plan. Their Professional plan adds enhanced online transaction reports and statistics, Pay-on-Use Returns™ return shipping labels, and stealth indicias.
The stealth indicia (also known as the postage-paid indicia) can be an awesome tool for the eBay seller. By using this feature, your customer will not see the exact amount of postage you paid. This permits some of your trade secrets to remain … um, secret.
With all these professional features, you’d think that Endicia's service would be expensive, but it’s not. The Premium plan is $15.95 a month, and the Professional Plan is $34.95 a month.
eBay and PayPal shipping services
eBay continues to add great features for sellers. Now you can not only buy postage and ship with USPS through eBay but also print labels on your own printer. If you ship lots of items and use a different service for printing your postage, both eBay and PayPal allow you to input tracking information on the site. Just click the Add Tracking Info link for the transaction on PayPal, as shown in Figure 1-7. Input the USPS, UPS, or other shipping company’s tracking or delivery-confirmation information (see Figure 1-8), and PayPal sends an email to your buyer with that information.
FIGURE 1-7: Choosing to add tracking information on PayPal Activity.
FIGURE 1-8: Adding the shipper’s tracking number on eBay.
The information you added appears in both the record of your PayPal transaction and the buyer’s record in their account, as shown in Figure 1-9.
FIGURE 1-9: Tracking becomes part of the sales record on your My eBay page.
eBay shipping services work great when you’re just starting out in your business — but after you get rolling, you need a mailing service that includes email and recordkeeping, such as Endicia or Stamps.com. The issue connected with using eBay for shipping is important: When you process your shipping (UPS or USPS), the shipping amount is deducted from your PayPal (sales revenue) balance. I like to keep my expenses separate in my bookkeeping process.
If you’re starting a business in earnest, you need to keep track of your online expenses separately. Allowing PayPal to deduct your shipping costs from your incoming revenue can create a bookkeeping nightmare. You need to have exact figures for expenses and income — and it helps keep confusion to a minimum when your deposits (withdrawals from your PayPal account to your bank) match your sales receipts. If you want to ship through eBay, be sure you withdraw your sales amount to your checking account before you process your shipping. That way your shipping can be charged to your business credit card for easier tracking.
To purchase postage and print your label for a specific purchase, click the Print Shipping Label button next to the payment record in your PayPal account overview. You’ll be taken through a step-by-step process for paying for your shipping and printing the appropriate label on your printer.
Stamps.com
Stamps.com purchased 31 Internet postage patents from e-stamp, making its services a combination of the best of both sites. (e-stamp discontinued its online postage service late in 2000; I was a big fan.) Many eBay sellers moved their postage business over to Stamps.com, which purchased Endicia in 2015 for $215 million in cash. Today, the Endicia site continues its own operation and is geared toward more professional shipping solutions.
Stamps.com works with software that you probably use every day, such as Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Office; Corel WordPerfect; and Intuit. Here are some features you might enjoy:
Use your printer to print postage. If your printer allows it, you can even print your envelopes along with bar-coded addresses, your return address, and postage. This saves quite a bit in label costs.
The Stamps.com Envelope Wizard permits you to design your own envelopes, including a logo or graphics. You can purchase a box of 500 #10 envelopes for as little as $4.99 at an office supply store.
Have Stamps.com check that your addresses are valid. Before printing any postage, the Stamps.com software contacts the USPS database of every valid mailing address in the United States. This Address Matching System (AMS) is updated monthly.
Have Stamps.com add the extra four digits to your addressee’s ZIP code. This nifty feature helps ensure swift delivery while freeing you of the hassle of having to look up the information.
Purchasing postage is as easy as going to the Stamps.com website and clicking your mouse. Your credit card information is kept secure on its site. With Stamps.com, you don’t need any extra fancy equipment, although most introductory deals come with a free 5-pound-maximum postal scale. The scale also functions on its own. Serious users should get a better-quality postage scale from a seller on eBay or through Office Depot.
Because Office Depot delivers any order more than $50 free the next day, it’s a great place to get paper and labels. Better buys on scales, though, can be found on eBay, especially if you search postage scale. I use a super-small, 50-pound-maximum scale that I bought on eBay for under $20.
Stamps.com charges a flat rate of $15.99 per month. The site regularly offers sign-up bonuses that include as much as $20.00 free postage or a free 5-pound-maximum digital postage scale. To find the Stamps.com deal of the month, visit its website at www.stamps.com.
Organizing your stock
To save you time, I researched the subject and found some readily available, reasonably priced shelves. Just go to Target or Costco and look for Seville Classics four-shelf commercial shelving, sold in 36- and 48-inch-wide units. Seville Classics also has an eBay store where you can buy from them direct. Look for them at 
You also need to know a little about what it takes to make a sturdy box. The de facto standard for quality in general-use shipping boxes is 200-pound double-wall corrugated.
x 5
x ⅝
x 2⅜ x 12
x 11¾ x 3
x 14
x 15
Okay, I’m a savvy-enough consumer and businesswoman that I don’t believe in paying for extras — nor do I believe in being a victim of hidden charges. The online postage arena — while providing helpful tools that make running your eBay business easier — is fraught with bargains, deals, and introductory offers. I urge you to read these offers carefully so you know what you’re getting yourself into: Evaluate how much it will cost you to start and to maintain an ongoing relationship with the company. Although you may initially get some free hardware and pay a low introductory rate, the fine print might tell you that you’ve also agreed to pay unreasonably high monthly prices six months down the line. I always double-check pricing before getting into anything, and I urge you to do the same.
