New Seller on eCrater - Archrival Autographs

archrivalautographs · Posts: 5

Hello,

I am very excited to open my store here using the eCrater website. I have been a long time eBay seller. With all the changes, high fees, and general hassles that eBay has instituted over the past few years; I see the writing on the wall that small sellers are no longer wanted there.

I am very interested in any feedback and advice anyone is willing to give with my eCrater site. I have been getting a lot of individual views on my items, some a lot more than I have on eBay, but I have not had any sales yet. I am just curious if I have something in my store set up wrong.

Also, using eCrater I know I will have to find my customers versus on eBay where they just find me. Any suggestions on the best ways to find customers would be a great help.

My eCrater page is: http://archrivalautographs.ecrater.com/

If there is anyway I can help anyone here in the eCrater community, please do not hesitate to ask.

Thank you for your time and God Bless everyone here,
Jason

SammysSupplies · Posts: 1631

First off, remove any reference to auctions, there just aren't any here. For me, your paragraph on the front page cuts off. Don't forget to fill out out your FAQ's and Term pages. Your description with your picture is, in theory, suppose to be just that, a description of the item up for sale. Everything else should be in terms.

I wish you luck, it sounds like you already having a following.

archrivalautographs · Posts: 5

Thank you so much for viewing my store and your feedback SammySupplies. I had a few follow up questions if you have time to answer.

I am not sure what to put into the FAQs and terms pages. Is terms just for shipping? Are my descriptions to long, should I put the information from description into the FAQs pages.

Thank you for the feedback on the auction references. I realized I was putting that term in my listings about half way through. I have not gone back and changed all of the listings yet.

I wonder if anyone else is having problems with the text on my site. It appears correctly on my notebook but it is small machine.

Do you have a suggestion for the best place to create a logo?

oakteakstore · Posts: 1050

Your pictures need to be at least 800 pixels on the shortest side. The one I looked at was about 550 or so. Too small.

Good luck with your store!

tigercreekgifts · Posts: 6293

Welcome to ecrater! Yes, the message on your store front is getting cut off at the bottom. Try removing a few words or seeing if you can reword it all to fit a little better. The info that needs to go on your terms and FAQs page is stuff like what shipping service & packing materials you use, how long does shipping normally take?, do you offer refunds?, that sort of stuff.

The terms page can be used to basically sum up the same stuff you'd mention in your FAQs except, the FAQs is in a question and answer format and the terms is just your way of telling customers info flat out. You do need to remove the mention of an auction because, since we don't have auctions here that statement may confuse your potential buyers.

If you don't want to go back through all of your listings to remove or edit that statement, copy/paste this statement: "The scan in the auction is not a standard generic picture, but the actual puck and signature available." Pull up the global editor located in your store admin (left hand side menu). Set the global editor to "All categories" and for the action select "replace text in description". Copy/paste the above statement into the box for the text you want to replace. Below that, copy/paste the same sentence into the "replace text with" box but this time, edit that sentence to say what you want to change like this: "The scan in this listing is not a standard generic picture, but the actual puck and signature available.".

Give it an hour or two and the info will change on all listings on its own.

viewfinders · Posts: 1561

Welcome to eCRATER.

I was about to say that you had a typo in your name when I realized the name was Arch Rival and not Archival.

Don't forget to fill in your terms page.

archrivalautographs · Posts: 5

Thank you so much for your feedback and advice. It means a lot to me that each of you took the time to offer your help. Each of you have great websites and I will be sure to share them with my friends and family.

First off, the text on my home page does not cut off on my browser so I cannot see what is cut off. I did edit the text though. It would be a big help if anyone could check and see if the problem has been resolved.

Second, thank you for the technique on editing Tiger. I simply had the global editter changer every word "auction" to "listing." I hope that will work.

Third, I added a FAQ and Terms page upon every-ones advice. Thank you again for the help there too.

Everyone here has been so kind and helpful. I really appreciate it and if there is anything I can do to help anyone, please let me know.

archrivalautographs · Posts: 5

Also, I was reading on another thread that adding shipping information into the description would negatively affect placing on google searches. Should I delete that information from my listings? Also, it mentioned to place the shipping price information into the terms page.

tigercreekgifts · Posts: 6293

tigercreekgifts · Posts: 6293

Your front page message is cut off when I view it in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. By the way, did you copy some of my terms? You must have because you said almost the exact same thing I did.

You said:

All orders are shipped via the United States Postal Service (USPS) and will be mailed via First Class or Priority Mail depending on the size, shape, and weight of your order. We can also ship using Express mail for additional fee. All orders will be shipped out within 1 to 3 business days after payment has been received. We do not ship on Saturdays and Sundays.

Shipping to US destinations will typically arrive to the customer within just 2 to 4 business days.

My Page Says:

All orders are shipped via the United States Postal Service (USPS) and will be mailed via First Class, Parcel Select, or Priority depending on the size, shape, and weight of your order.

All orders will be shipped out within 1 to 3 business days after payment has been received. Once shipped, 98% of orders will typically arrive to the customer within just 2 to 3 business days. The other 2% of orders will arrive in 4 to 5 business days. We do not ship on Sundays.

I don't mind people coming to my store to get ideas but, when someone copies me almost verbatim, I don't like that. I came up with those statements because those are my terms so, you should rewrite your terms into your own words please. You also copied my FAQs page almost verbatim too. Please change this too and come up with your own questions and answers. I worked VERY hard to create that FAQs page and format my questions and answers in a way that no one else has. You have no idea how many times I edited and rewrote those questions to get them "perfect" to me and to have someone else come along and take them from me, that's not right.

archrivalautographs · Posts: 5

Thank you again for your help tiger. I sincerely apologize for using your FAQ and Terms as more than a guideline. I only slightly tweaked your pages to work with my business which was totally wrong. After reading your following post and looking at other sites I realize how wrong and lazy I was. I made the wrong assumption that most of these pages were similar across pages. I hope you will take this as a compliment too, that after looking at other pages your FAQ page is one of the finest.

I have taken all of these pages down and I hope you accept my apology for my actions. I want you to know that this is not how I want represent myself or my business here. Even though we sell different things we are all still a community and I like that about eCrater.

tigercreekgifts · Posts: 6293

Thank you Archrival! I wasn't trying to be mean or anything by what I said, I really did work long and hard to get those FAQs just right constantly tweeking and updating. I just had someone on Amazon steal a lot of my photos a few months ago, photos of items that are not one of a kind that a lot of people have for sale, so I had to go through my store and take newer better photos and place my business logo over top of them which is supposedly frowned up by Google too but, I had no choice.

Thank you for the compliments about my terms, I'm glad that someone thinks they were great! But yeah, I wasn't trying to me mean I guess I just had my guard up after what happened with my photos a few months ago. I had to contact Amazon and get them to remove that seller's listings which was a big pain. Every time I emailed them, they kept writing me back telling me to contact the seller if I had an issue with an item I purchased. LOL, I didn't even purchase anything but I had to email 3 times before they finally read my email and realized I wasn't talking about an order I had placed so, it was a big ordeal.