Like the “Magazine Publisher” (who shall remain nameless), who decided she would lift an article of mine, with illustrations, and use it in her digital “magazine” without so much as a by-your-leave. When I discovered it, I calmly wrote her and asked her to give me attribution. I didn’t ask for money (although I often write for pay and/or advertising revenues), I didn’t get pushy, I just informed her that it was my work and if she was going to use it, I would appreciate a byline.

I never heard back from her (although we travel in a very small circle), and she removed my work from her website almost immediately thereafter. Frankly, I found her lack of reply unsettling, and as I had told her, had she but asked, I would have given her my work to use for free, as long as I got a byline. Rude.

Then there was the website which right-clicked on one of my photos and used it on another, similar site. When I contacted the owner of the site (again, someone I know personally), he pooh-poohed my concern, and told me he was permitted to use my photos. Mind you, this is a man who works in the print publishing industry, and who certainly should have known better. I replied back that I was a professional photographer (among the many hats I wear), and I retain copyright to my images, and would he please, in future, ask before taking them.

He replied again in an even more condescending tone that he was a Blah Blah at the Blah Blah publication, and he knew all about these things, and he didn’t have to ask. Now, my husband is a much bigger BB at a much bigger BB, and I used to work at a BB, and my family used to own BBs! So it’s not like I’m talking out of my, well, ear (to be polite.) I replied one final time that I wanted my image removed and that in future they were not to use my work without permission. He finally took it down, but never apologized and never replied. Really rude.

And today I had an email from a woman who wanted to purchase one of my items from my eBay store that had ended (items last for up to 30 days then have to be relisted.) She gave me a big song and dance about how she looooooved the image, but she and her husband were both out of work, and were in the process of moving, but to please let her know when I re-listed it. I did some research on her ID (not as hard as you might think) and discovered she writes a blog in which she posts images from the items she buys and gives them to people for free.

On the surface, that’s all well and good, and actually appears quite generous. But many of my items are reproductions of vintage images, on which I have worked long and hard to improve (color correction, retouching of scratches, dust, and other damage, and so on.) And just because you purchase one of my cards, doesn’t mean you’re buying the copyright to my work. Not for less than triple digits, sorry, no. As well, this woman seems to be selling the images she uses as fabric blocks, which is another thing I do. So I politely declined her request and put her on my blocked list. Clueless.

I can certainly appreciate the freedom that the Internet gives us, and the incredible access to information that it allows. But just because something is on the Internet, doesn’t mean it is free for the taking. And as someone who works long and hard on her images, dammit, the least someone could do is ask before taking them! Now, I do watermark much of what I post now, and use a service that allows me to track my images across most of the ‘Net. But there are still things that slip through, and it’s a risk I, and every other artist takes, when we post things online. But it doesn’t make it right, and I am certainly not happy when I discover it.

So the next time you’re tempted to just right-click an image and use it for something, please check to ensure that the thing you’re about to take doesn’t belong to someone, and if it does, either ask them if you can use it, or just don’t take it. Because access doesn’t mean permission.

End of rant, stepping down from soapbox now…

I come from a family which has always reveled in sending cards. My grandfather was a dedicated correspondent, sending letters and cards to all and sundry his whole life. My mother and aunt sent each other, and their friends, cards for every holiday and notes in-between (a habit my aunt continues to this day.) My mother kept detailed lists of the Christmas cards she had sent, which card went to whom, so that she wouldn’t duplicate her efforts for at least several years following. My mother was a huge collector of contemporary greeting cards (as well as the vintage ephemera I work with now.) She loved to shop for cards, and had several favorite small card companies that she bought whole lines from (including Green Tiger Press, which is now Laughing Elephant, who make the most gorgeous high-end cards!)

Many years ago, when my children were small, my mother and I discussed starting a small greeting card company like Green Tiger Press. She had her huge collection of vintage images, and knew we could do the same sort of thing they do. She also considered licensing her images to a company such as GTP, which would allow her to keep her collection, but still branch out and perhaps generate some income at the same time (so she could buy more cards, of course!)

When my mother died, my father, who was not a collector or fan of ephemera, considered selling her whole collection (over 10,000 pieces of paper) to a dealer, just to get it out of the house (it practically fills a room.) I convinced him to let me sell the postcards on eBay for him, and KatyDids Cards was born. Over the past two and a half years, I’ve sold postcards, Victorian trade cards, and other paper items on eBay, in partnership with my dad.

But this fall, I decided I wanted to try to make my mother’s dream a reality. The technology of printers has gotten to the point now that I can print a card that is almost (not quite) as good as one printed on an offset printer. I am a fair hand with Photoshop, and can fix any blemishes or tears in the cards, and correct fading or yellowing with age. So I bought the company from my father, and have jumped headlong into the greeting card business. I still sell on eBay, but every card that is sold has a scan saved that I can use later (I had to buy a big additional hard drive to store the images!) And I sent out my first catalogue of Christmas cards just recently, and already have a number of orders for cards.

So my reply to NPR is, greeting cards aren’t dead at all! There’s no way an eCard can replace the personal feel of something you take out of your mailbox, sit down and open, and see the writing of the sender. The ability to touch and feel things is still very basic to human nature, and holding something that someone who cares about us has also held reaches deeply into our hearts. No eCard can replace that I think.

So I encourage you all to find a source for cards that you love, images that move you, and send cards! (And email me at katydidscards@gmail.com for a catalogue of holiday cards, and a sample card mailed to you if you’d prefer.) Note, my website, www.katydidscards.com is still under construction, but I hope to have it up and running soon!

In the past, things were much more straightforward than they are now. And I’m not claiming to be an expert of any sort on how eBay sets up Best Match. But there are a few things I’ve learned that seem to be working for me, especially since the last several rounds of changes for sellers.

DO: Use good keywords in your item titles.

Follow the eBay Rule of Three: the first three keywords in your item title should be those that your potential buyers will most likely use to search with. Your item title doesn’t have to read like a sentence, it has to bring buyers to your listing. For example, let’s say I have a vintage postcard with artwork by Frances Brundage, published by the Raphael Tuck Company in their series number 204. It’s a Valentine’s Day card, and has an image of a beautiful woman holding a yellow rose. You could, using the 55 Characters eBay allows, title the item something like “Beautiful Woman Holding Yellow Rose by Frances Brundage.” But that wouldn’t be using the keywords in the most optimal way.

A far more effective way to list such an item would be to put the three most important keywords first, to ensure your item pops as close as possible to the top of the search list, like this: Brundage Valentine Tuck 204 BEAUTIFUL WOMEN Yellow Rose. Such use of keywords puts this item in the top three shown out of 69 items that come up with the search terms “Brundage Valentine.” So it pays to think like a buyer, and study how your buyers use keywords to search for items, so you can use the system to your advantage.

DO: Use Item Specifics to include more keywords that will allow your item to be seen by more potential buyers.

Again, I’m not an expert on how they work, nor do I know for sure how eBay factors them into the Best Match algorithm. But in my experience, listings that have them sell better than those that don’t. So use them, they’re free! Be creative, put in things that you’d like to have in the title but don’t have room for. Can’t hurt, might help.

DON’T: Keyword spam in your item titles.

This is a big no-no, and could get your item pulled by eBay if they notice it, or someone reports it. Keyword spamming means using words in your item title that do not bear directly on your listing. eBay takes a dim view of this, and all sellers should know the specifics of their rules, which can be found here: Search and browse manipulation policy.

DON’T: List things as Good Til Canceled.

When I started out, I had a number of items I knew would be “long tails”, those that might sit in my store for a while, but would eventually sell. For such items GTC seemed perfect, they’d just keep rolling over until they sold, and I wouldn’t have to worry about manually relisting them. That’s fine, in theory. However the way Best Match works with regards to GTC goes something like this:

List an item. It doesn’t sell during the first 30 days, although a number of potential buyers view it (let’s say 30.) eBay’s Best Match algorithm takes into account that you had 30 views but no one purchased. So the next time the item rolls over, it’s pushed lower down in Best Match (the default way that items are shown to potential buyers.) The more months that pass with the item unsold, the lower and lower it ends up in Best Match.

eBay has given sellers a tool that can be used to determine how well an item shows up in Search, called the Search Visibility Analysis. I am still learning to use this tool, and will note it contains some pretty good data that sellers can use to tune up their listings. You can search by specific item number, or check how your items are doing in a specific category. One of the things eBay does tell us using this tool is “The ratio of sales to the number of times the listing has been displayed to members in search results” has an impact on where the item ends up in Best Match. And in my experience, using GTC lowers that ratio, and thereby lowers an item in Search.

So how to work around that problem? A simple suggestion:

DO: Re-list items using either Sell Similar, or Relist as Fixed Price.

I’ve had an eBay store for a long time. In the latest round of changes, eBay put all “store” items ‘into core” search (theoretically anyway.) What was interesting to note for the several months after that happened was, items that ended and were GTC relisted, were still called “Store Items” by eBay in the end of listing email I got. Items that I manually ended and then relisted using either Sell Similar or Relist as Fixed Price, somehow got shoved back into Search as brand new items. I have many items that sat in my store for months which, when I relisted as Sell Similar, sold the very same day, or within that same week. It’s almost as if they were sitting still invisible (as store items used to be hidden from Core Search), even though they were, theoretically, in core.

My conclusions are based only on my own experience, and as such are anecdotal. But the suggestions I make here have worked for me, and may well work for other sellers too. I know my sales have stayed pretty even during these changes, while other sellers have really struggled with drops in sales and exposure. Try some of these tips and see if they help. At this point, some of us will use all the help we can get to increase our sales on eBay! Best of luck to all you sellers out there, and I hope this will be of some small help to you.

I’ve listed all my postcards, trade cards, and other ephemera there, we’ll see how it does. For now, I’m in “wait and see mode.”

With the way sales seem to have tanked on eBay, it’s more than time for me to diversify. I need to start working on my own stand-alone website, as well as branch out to other venues. I may investigate eCrater later today. I’ve considered Ruby Lane and Playles, but they each have relatively high fees to set up there, which on top of the eBay fees I’m already paying, I can’t do. So for now, up front free works well for me. With luck diversifying will increase overall sales as well as the bottom line.

But only time will tell…

I liked the three cent Store items a lot. I have things that while they have low sellthrough, do eventually sell. Dealing in vintage collectibles as I do, the things I have are often one of a kind, and when a buyer finds them, they’re usually very happy to have done so. I have buyers who come through regularly and purchase ten or twenty or thirty items out of my store at a time (love them!)

But now the only choices sellers on eBay will have is to pay for Fixed Price, or Auction. Fixed Price items will cost a given amount depending on if you have a store and what level of store you are subscribed to. I have two stores on eBay now. I will be closing one, and have upgraded the other. I had them separate because one contained items that didn’t belong to me, they are from an estate I am disbursing, and the other was for my own items. I can certainly put them all in one store, it just means more paperwork and organizational stuff for me. My primary focus is on the estate anyway, so it’s not that big of a deal. But it is annoying.

Time will tell as to whether or not my fees will increase. According to the calculator eBay set up for us to evaluate our future fees, mine either will only increase a bit, or perhaps even fall a bit, depending on how I crunch the numbers. But I do have to say I am more than tired of the tinkering. Can we not just leave things the way they are for a while, please? I feel as if my head is spinning, all I want to do is do my work, not have to continually be reacting to some change eBay has thrust upon sellers.

Time will tell how this will go. The changes take place at the end of March. April and May will be very illuminating months indeed.

The templates were nice, although I picked one that was very simple, as I like to let the item I am selling do most of the talking. What I really liked was the image hosting, the click-to-enlarge feature for images, and the scheduled listing. Those things were very nice indeed. So I stayed, and also started an account with my other store, VirtualAntiques, from which I have been selling postcards and ephemera on and off since 1998. Setting up the various “profiles” took some time, but once I got it figured out, things went smoothly.

I did find that from time to time Auctiva’s website would be down, or slow. But I took that in stride and didn’t complain. I was rather shocked at the whole Malware incident this past February, (see this link on AuctionBytes for more info on that), but didn’t suffer any major damage to my system (just lost time and listings), so let it go.

But the recent price changes were the last straw for me. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Auctiva needing to charge for their service, I do understand that. I honestly never really understood how they were able to offer their service for free (see this link for a ColderICE blog entry about how Auctiva was Round Tripping eBay’s links) but wasn’t going to worry about it. I should have known, you get what you pay for in the long run.

So, there’s this sudden announcement that Auctiva is going to start charging us for listings. Start charging us for photo hosting. And the part that really got me upset, they were proposing to start charging us a Final Value Fee for each listing that sold that we had listed through their service. Ok, I can see a listing fee. I can see an image hosting fee. But to reach into my pocket and take a percentage of my sale? I don’t think so. And to top it all off, these changes were going to take place in 30 days. Whoa!

Now even eBay gives sellers time to adjust to major changes that they make. And we all know that eBay can sometimes not take sellers wishes into account when making changes. But Auctiva didn’t bother to float these ideas to focus groups, they just boom, told us we had 30 days to pick a payment plan and get ourselves sorted out. My initial reaction was anger and frustration. I felt threatened, stampeded, and anxious. When I looked at the calculator they initially set up, it seemed as if my current usage was going to cost anywhere between $70 to $120 per month. Quite a change from free! I immediately started casting about for alternatives, looked at Vendio, but found their service too expensive for me too (later the CEO of Auctiva said he based his initial payment plans on those being used by Vendio.) I then looked at InkFrog, which seemed like it would work well for me. A flat rate of $9.95 per month, and I could use both my eBay user names through the same account!

However, the prospect of having to move over 1,000 listings to another service in the space of 30 days or less was incredibly daunting. It would have meant manually revising at least 33 listings per day, not to mention moving all the photos associated with those listings (thank goodness I still have them archived!) The thought of getting it all done in time was just overwhelming, and I know I wasn’t the only one. The forums on Auctiva and eBay were abuzz with users who were protesting the proposed changes. The Twitterverse was atweet with unhappy users. The eBay seller presence on the Internet just shouted with dismay.

Then the changes started coming out of Auctiva. At one point, they offered an 18 month price lock-in at $10, but only if you paid the money up front. Then they offered several tiered levels. It seemed as if the price levels being offered changed at least once a day. Reports came in from people who tried to close their accounts, and when they did, a screen popped up offering them a “special rate” of $10 flat per month. People (like me) got unsolicited emails from Auctiva Support offering them higher rates (they offered me a rate of $25 per month, based on my usage.) When people started posting on Auctiva’s forums about these special offers, the messages were deleted. After a certain point I was blocked from posting on their forums, I guess because I called their CEO Jeff greedy, and he didn’t like that.

During all the online discussion, at one point Jeff began to reply to the messages being posted in the eBay Seller Central forum. He posted a number of rather unprofessional messages, including one where he referred to the people who run InkFrog as “a couple of guys working out of their garage.” Now I went looking for that message yesterday, and eBay has scrubbed it off their board, interestingly enough. But enough of us saw it, and referred to it later, so it’s entered the zeitegeist for good now. I think it was those comments, made by the CEO of a company, that made me decide I really was leaving and not going back. I found them unprofessional and unbecoming. In fact the way the whole thing has been handled really destroyed any trust I might have had in the management of the company.

So I bit the bullet, signed up with InkFrog, and began the process of moving my listings. Bless them, they created a tool that moved all my images in all my eBay listings (active and inactive), so I no longer had to have my pictures hosted on Auctiva. And they’ve also created a template stripper that takes out all the Auctiva HTML from listings, which is very usefull. You still have to revise your listings afterwards, but it makes things easier by far. And all along, my interactions with the InkFrog staff have been pleasant and professional (except when we’re swapping jokes), and they have answered my questions quickly and with excellent info. InkFrog has locked in their price levels for at least three years (as long as you sign up before December 31st.) Using their service is easy, I made the transition with little to no trouble at all. In fact, I prefer the way they do things to Auctiva now, much easier in some respects. I’ve experimented with their third party insurance and like it, and now I’m even looking at opening my own eCommerce site through their buyitsellit site!

So I guess I ought to send out a “thank you” to the management of Auctiva, because if they hadn’t put me through the wringer they way they did, I never would have left and found an even better way to do things. So thanks Jeff! Best of luck to ya…

KatyDids Cards (the name of my second eBay shop, domain, and Twitter name) is based on a project I started a year ago. I am working to help my father disburse the estate of my mother, who over the course of almost fifty years of marriage had accumulated a collection of approximately 10,000 pieces of ephemera. The bulk of it is vintage postcards, but there are also Victorian trade cards and greeting cards, tobacciana, menus, scraps (also known as oblaten), the works. If it’s paper, she collected it.

My mother died suddenly two years ago. A few years prior to her death, she and I had talked at length about creating a line of contemporary greeting cards based on the images she owned in her collection, ala the wonderful Green Tiger Press, who are now owned by Laughing Elephant. The vast majority of her images were old enough to be copyright free, and it was something we were definitely going to do “when we got around to it.” But at the time I had small children, and she had many other projects she was working on, so we put it off, too long as it turned out.

When my father began to consider what he would do with mom’s collection of paper, I told him he had several options. He could sell it in bulk at auction, and get pennies on the dollar. Or, I could open a second eBay store, manage it for him, and sell the items individually. He decided on the second course, and KatyDids Cards was born!

Picking a name for the store/business was easy. My mom and I had talked about it previously, and she had chosen the name based on a book she loved as a child.

What I initially thought might just be a part-time gig for me has really taken off. I reached PowerSeller status on eBay a year after opening the store, which was a big mental boost for me. I work my tuchis off on this project, and really want it to work. My father is happy, as he is getting some monthly income from the store, and I am happy, as it’s allowing me to generate some part-time income for me too (although it’s really a full time job!) Mind you, neither of us is getting rich doing this, but I am doing my bit to help him, as he is elderly and handicapped, and would not be able to do the eBay thing on his own (no interest in the Internet at all, more’s the pity.) So it works out well all around.

In some ways though, it’s rather like being a kid working in a candy shop. I adore all the wonderful images in the items, some are just amazing. I do generally purchase some of the things from the estate every month for my own collection, and have to be careful not to buy too many! <grin>

All in all though, it’s a bittersweet affair. I miss my mom, she was a wonderful, highly educated woman who had impeccable taste and an eye for beauty. Many a time we went collecting together, and she could pick the one good piece out of a box of junk with ease. She had an encyclopedic mind for facts and history, and the world is a poorer place since her passing. But I am saving all the scans of the things I list in the store, and someday will put together some sort of compilation CD or perhaps even a book. But for now, I just keep plugging away, and know she is looking down at me with love…

An image from a print the collector owned, found among her things after her death. Now the store logo.

Once you have your image on your computer, there are some basic things you really need to do in order to optimize the image. First and foremost, crop the images so that any extraneous details are removed. We don’t want to see your entire kitchen (if you’ve photographed your item on your kitchen table), just the vase you’re trying to sell. We aren’t interested in a huge margin around the image, crop it down so all there is, is the image itself. That being said, please don’t crop too far, be sure to show us the edges which are important to determine condition.

Next comes color. Depending on your input device (scanner versus camera), you have have to take a number of steps here. The first is color correction. Compare the original item with what you are seeing on your screen. Do the colors match? If not, you’ll have to adjust them using your software of choice (I am a die-hard Photoshop fan, have been using it since it came out in the late ’80s.) You’ll need to check and correct color balance, making sure that you have your CMY (Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow) and your RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) in balance. Relatively easy to do, remembering that one balances the other: C balances R and so on. You may need to make these adjustments in one or more of three areas: Shadows, Midtones, or Highlights. Tweak the slider bars until the image you see in your hand matches the image you see on the screen. Practice with this option will train your eye and teach you where most of your adjustments will need to be made.

Adjusting brightness/contrast is the next step. Photoshop and other software often have “auto-adjust” options for this, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t (often they blow out the highlights where important detail is kept, so use with discretion.) Again, work with the original at hand so that you can most closely match it with what you’re seeing on the screen.

Finally, image size will often need to be tweaked. Most digital cameras create huge files which will generally need to be reduced before they can be used online. An important caveat here is to be sure of your final resolution. If your image is intended only for the computer screen, then 72 DPI (Dots Per Inch) is sufficient. However, should you ever need to out put your image, you will want to save it at a resolution of at least 300 DPI. We can go over resolution in another blog post, but for today, just remember those two scenarios, and adjust resolution accordingly.

Photoshop has a simple size reduction tool, I generally will downsize a scan 50% before uploading it for my eBay auctions, but a file from a digital camera will generally need to be reduced to at least 25% of the original. Your mileage may vary, experiment and see what works best for you. One caveat: larger files take longer to upload, and some hosting services (such as Auctiva) automatically adjust the image to what they feel is the optimal size, so there’s no point in leaving your files huge, as it will just waste your time.

Finally, it’s important to note that when adjusting your scan or photo for your online sale, there are certain things it’s generally considered not ethical to do. Retouching out problems is the biggest no-no of course. Cropping the image so that bad corners or tattered edges on a postcard is sure to get you in trouble with a buyer when the card arrives. And boosting contrast or chroma so that colors pop more than they do in real life is just plain unethical. My main goal is always for the buyer to say “The item was exactly as shown.” A little honestly up front goes a long, long way when it comes to your images, and going overboard to “clean up” an image can come around and bite you in the ass in the long run.

One final comment: one person’s monitor may show things differently than anothers, and it might be worth your while to calibrate your monitor to ensure what you are seeing really is what you are getting. But that’s another topic for another time.

In the first segment, Wally Kolenda spoke at length about podcasting, and how simple it is to use podcasting as a way to market your business and break into Internet Marketing. You don’t have to be a trained professional speaker, you don’t have to have a voice like Maria Callas, you just have to have knowlege and a desire to get your information out there to the world (a market for your info doesn’t hurt either!)

Second to speak was Marlene Gavens, and sadly I had to dash away from the computer during part of her talk, which irked me greatly, as it seemed as if she had a tonne of good info to impart (I am hoping someone took notes on her section, as I really want to review them!) She’s an eBay Certified Education Specialist and has a huge catalogue of training for those who are seeking to learn about eBay, or want to fine tune their eBay selling experience.

John Lawson spoke third, focusing on building a business without getting caught up in a “business plan” mode. He encouraged listeners to get out there and educate themselves using every and all sources, from your local public library (check out various audio books on business for free rather than paying to buy them); to using your local Chamber of Commerce to market yourself and your business. He encouraged us to automate as much as possible, use the new tools available online, and keep a vision of where we want to go with our business. Just  saying “I want a business” isn’t going to do it, as the old expression goes “Do what you love and the money will follow”, but John encourages us to do it smart.

Finally, Dave White wrapped the call up with some salient points about marketing yourself and your business in the ever-changing world of eCommerce. Dave is a former eBay employee, and has been selling on eBay and other online venues for over 11 years (longer than my own 10!) He does a weekly news and live call-in show targeted towards eBay and Internet Marketers, Basics to Business, streaming online Mondays from 1-3 pm ET.

So once all the bits and bytes of great info that was put out there today stops swirling around in my head I may do a follow-up post. For now, need to do some mental digesting. But wanted to thank these four for the great info!

Small sellers are what made eBay back in the day. One statement that really stood out was “The old Ebay was sitting in people’s attics. The new Ebay is sitting in warehouses,” said Lorrie Norrington, president of marketplaces. So now it seems that all of us who sell vintage items of any sort, are no longer valuable to eBay? That seems crazy to me.

I did a little market research this morning, pretty straight forward. When I search on eBay for the keyword “vintage”, a whopping 1,483,063 listings come up. I compare that to all the listings in the Computers & Networking catagory, and it has 1,342,683 items listed. Hmmmm. So I did some more. Right now there are 219,061 items listed under Antiques. And 243,552 items listed in Entertainment Memorabilia. And 2,066,462 in Collectibles!

So can someone explain why those of us who sell stuff “from our attics” are no longer valuable to eBay? Our listings don’t make them money?

Other longtime sellers are upset about this as well. My bud John from ColderICE has done a big rant about the recent Analyst Day that can be found here and which is well worth the read. Should you wish to read through the entire PDF of the presentation made, you can read it here (note, it’s a large file that takes time to load.)

I, like other smaller sellers, do wonder sometimes just what it is that TPTB at eBay are thinking…