Many online-auction sellers consider selling for others at one time or another. Known as consignment sales, eBay even has a formal program called Trading Assistants to play match-maker between clients and sellers (http://pages.ebay.com/tradingassistants.html). But consignment sales add another level of complexity to the business of selling online.
I recently received a letter from a reader named Judee who wondered which auction management tools have the ability to compute consignment sales. "I sell for about 20 different people and I charge different rates for different people (depending on what I am selling for them). On occasion, I may charge the same consignor two different percentages (depending on the final sale price of the item)." Judee wants the ability to print out various reports to calculate consignment sales and commissions. Several auction management services responded to Judee's question.
Kevin Olayan, President of Foo Dog Software Inc., (http://www.foodogsoftware.com) said, "Shooting Star doesn't directly support consignment sales. The easiest way to do this with our software is to use a separate eBay account. We are planning to add support in a future version."
Jason Ritenour, President of AuctionHawk (http://www.auctionhawk.com) said he has gotten other requests and will add a consignment feature soon.
Brandon Marz said AuctionHelper's (http://www.auctionhelper.com) software absolutely allows users to enter into a field who the item is being sold for. "Many years ago we started selling items for several different parties and recognized that many other sellers might be interested in also selling items for third parties. It's literally as simple as entering one field for who the item belongs to and then you can quickly and easily see how many items you have sold for that account, the total sales, etc."
If you would like to discuss consignment sales and auction management tools, please visit the AuctionBytes forums. (Vendors are welcome if they have useful tips to offer sellers.) The Auction Sites & Services Forum is at: http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=3.
About the author:
Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and AuctionBytes.com and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). Follow her on Twitter at @auctionbytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com.
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