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Having been fortunate enough myself to make a purchase
from The Art and Book Zone, I decided to get back in touch with Ros to
ask her if she would kindly do an interview for WomensBay. They
specialise in new / first edition books that are signed by the author -
great for collectors and investors. The quality of service I received
was absolutely excellent, so much so that the experience stayed with me.
Unbeknown to Ros, I’m often perusing her site to see if there are any
books that take my fancy, as I know I will receive an excellent service.
This is how you get repeat custom! Ros kindly agreed to the interview
(which she has managed to fit around her hectic schedule).
The Art & Book Zone
Q – Ros when did you first become a member of Ebay?
28th January 2003 – very
precise I know but that’s what is says when you click on my feedback!!
Q - How long did it take before you decided to specialise
in your chosen field?
Probably about 10 minutes on the basis
that I have always collected books and felt that was where I had some
very good knowledge which I could hopefully use to attract buyers and
also be able to answer questions such as ‘How do you know the book is a
first edition?’ ‘Is the book a first print?’ ‘What does the numeric
sequence mean on the copyright page?’ ‘How do I know the signature is
genuine?’
Having said it only
took me 10 minutes to decide to concentrate on books I did do about 3
months research first. I needed to be able to have access to a constant
supply of books and therefore needed to have trade accounts with the 2
major UK book wholesalers. This took quite a while, as they
did not know me
and I didn’t have any trade references at all although my bankers were
happy to supply a very good reference. In the end it was a bit of a
fluke that I was able to open my first trade account and from that I was
able to open the others fortunately.
Q - How do you manage to get all of those books signed?
Do you travel very far to the signings and do you spend a long time
waiting around?
This
has been the hardest bit of all. Being based 10 miles from Land’s End
with a fairly naff road system to the ‘outside world’ we have needed to
plan attending signing events like a military operation really!
Fortunately over the last 6 months or so Ottakar’s in Truro (a
reasonably short 27 miles away) have had a good number of signing
sessions with some quite famous authors attending. We have been as far
as Winchester for a signing session plus Bath. We recently joined a
children’s book group in Plymouth (80 miles away!) and they have around
6 authors attending various events over a year and recently had Garth
Nix and Malorie Blackman as guest authors. We found out last month that
on World Book Day on 3rd March this year The Eden Project
near St Austell (48 miles away) had a special book day with the likes of
Philip Pullman, Lemony Snicket and Charmian Hussey in attendance but
they didn’t do any advertising of the event at all!! We also use our
holidays as book hunting trips and try to visit as many parts of the UK
as possible; we still have an awful lot to cover! We pick a ‘central’
location to stay and plan our visits around this before we leave home so
we are pretty focused in what we want to cover. We spent Christmas 2003
in Hay on Wye which is England’s ‘home of books’ with just under 40
bookshops in this small town, a mind boggling experience! In fact, after
2 days we were seemingly getting nowhere in our search for books so we
went ‘back to the drawing board’ using the very good pamphlet produced
in Hay with all the bookshops in it and crossed off the ones we didn’t
need to visit and re-planned where we should be visiting. Fortunately
this worked very well indeed. The bookshops in Hay only close on
Christmas day.
Q -
Would you class this as your job, or is this a way of making ‘extra’
money?
Quick answer. Definitely my job and I
love it.
Q - Have you ever had any bad experiences with customers
and if so, would you care to elaborate?
Firstly I should say
that the majority of customers on ebay are absolutely excellent to deal
with, really friendly and a delight to sell to and deal with. On the
other hand there are some complete prats who don’t read the descriptions
to see what they are buying and then complain about the book they have
bought not being what they thought it was! Others haven’t bought
anything for ages and have changed their e-mail address in the meantime
but not changed their details with ebay and then when they don’t receive
contact, even though you might have tried every avenue possible
including phoning, leave negative feedback. We have also received
e-mails containing abusive and threatening language from ebayers, which
we immediately report to ebay and they normally end up as being ‘no
longer a registered user’.
Q - What advice would you
give to anyone who is fairly new to Ebay and what advice would you share
with members who are already established?
Try
to use the various seller tools that ebay provide, most are excellent
and for people who are selling around 100 items a month, many of which
are duplicate items then ‘selling manager pro’ at £4.99 a month is a
bargain. The majority of ebay tools have some form of tutorial with
them, which are really easy to follow and contain very good help and
guidance. Try buying a few small priced items first to see how the
system works and look at what sort of ‘customer service’ you receive.
Take the good bits of service and upgrade them to suit the products you
are selling. Customer service and quality of product are the 2 main
areas that will ensure your feedback is glowing. Try to personalise all
e-mails and invoices you send to customers by using their name and the
common courtesies of please and thank you. It is amazing how many people
don’t! Respond to queries within an hour if possible. Customers are more
likely to buy from a seller who provides the information asked for in a
short time scale. Make sure your descriptions are totally accurate and
honest on all that you sell. Please don’t use words like ‘mint’ for
describing books as in reality there is no such thing!! By the time they
have been handled by the publishers, then the wholesalers and then the
shop staff they will have some wear somewhere.
Q - Is
there anything that you would like to add?
Try not to be annoyed when an item you know should sell for a certain
price doesn’t. Work on the principle of what you paid for the item and
what you think is a reasonable return on it and set your minimum bid
price around that figure. Some will sell for the bid price, some will go
for more and some won’t sell but don’t be disheartened. Remember too
that you have an audience of around 190million people on ebay who are
all on different time zones so try to space out your items accordingly
which is where the ebay tools can come in handy as you can schedule
items to appear on ebay up to a month in advance, choosing the time they
start to your own convenience. Use something like a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet to record things like the date you put the item on ebay,
what it is, when the start time is, when the end time is, how much you
paid for it, what the ebay listing fees are, what it sold for, the ebay
selling fees, how much you are charging for posting and packing and the
actual cost to you once posted, the date the customer paid, how they
paid, the date you posted the item. Be very wary of any e-mails you
receive purporting to be from ebay or Paypal that ask for you to click
on a ‘link’ within the e-mail – it will be a spoof, send it onto either
spoof@ebay.co.uk
or
spoof@paypal.com
If the e-mails are genuinely from ebay then they will appear in your
‘My messages’ section of your ‘My ebay’ as well as in your normal e-mail
inbox.
This concludes the interview with The Art and Book Zone,
if you would like to visit their site to have a look at all of the
fantastic books up for grabs – you can click on the link below or look
them up on eBay. Don’t forget Christmas is looming – and a signed book
would make a great gift!
http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQfgtpZ1QQfrppZ25QQsassZtheartandbookzone
Click the above link or you can search for them under
their user name
theartandbookzone
On eBay!
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