eBay has many tools to help both new and experienced sellers to manage their listings and their sales. It can be overwhelming for a new seller to understand all the tools and to know how and when to use them. I will break the most common ones down in this article for you.

Seller Hub

Your seller hub page is the page that you will find most of the tools for managing your eBay business. It is the central hub. On it, you will find the tools that are available to manage and create your listings, monitor your sales and listings, view payouts and check your business performance and analytics.

Seller hub can be customized to suit you. It is designed to be an interactive dashboard. The seller hub becomes available to every user once they have successfully made their first sale.

Login to it and instantly have access to all the activity on every order, including current listings and completed listings. From the hub, you can manage and create listings either singularly or in bulk. There are tools for marketing or to conduct market research on an item and there are performance tools that will help you understand your seller costs, buyer traffic and more. And the best part? The new seller hub downloads all of these reports into a CSV report.

Selling Manager and Selling Manager Pro

Selling Manager is a free tool that helps medium-size sellers run their business. Pro is free for Premium store subscribers and above and is a paid tool for any seller beneath that status. It costs $15.99 a month and can be tried on a free trial for the first month.

Selling Manager lets you create listings in bulk or individually, see all your eBay listings in one spot, perform post-sales steps in bulk and to view archived records of your sales and reports.

Selling Manager Pro does all the same things and has the added bonus of having inventory management and automation features, including saving more listing templates.

If you want to subscribe to the Pro version, go to your seller hub and click on Subscriptions. Pick Select and Review under the title Selling Manager Pro. Finally, click Submit Order. You will need a store account to access Pro. If you don’t have one, you can subscribe to one under Choose Store Subscription. If your store is Premium level or higher, you will automatically be opted in to use Selling Manager Pro.

Selling Templates

The easiest way to create multiple listings for similar items is to create a selling template. eBay allows you to save templates so that you don’t have to start each listing from scratch. The option to do this is in your seller hub under Listing Templates. It gives you the choice here to create new templates or edit existing ones.

In Selling Manager Pro, you can save up to 20 templates and in Selling Manager, you can save up to 10. It will even allow you to create a template out of an active listing if you forgot to save it when you posted the listing. You do this from the Active Listings page. Click on Save to Inventory, name it, and save.

The biggest reason that I use templates is it saves time when I have multiple items to list and it allows me to have consistent information in all my listings across the board which makes my business look a whole lot more professional.

Promotions Manager

This tool is only for eBay store subscribers. Promotions can help you attract buyers or clear out old stock easily.

There are five different types of promotions you can set up using this tool.

• Order discounts: Offer discounts can be based on order size or the amount spent by a customer. You can also create promotions such as offering a percentage off a second item or a BOGO offer.
• Codeless coupons: Offer exclusive discounts with a virtual coupon.
• Promotional shipping: Offer cheaper shipping on items that you predetermine qualify for the promotion.
• Sales events: Reduce prices for selected items.
• Volume price discounts: Offer tiered discounts to customers who purchase multiple quantities of a single item.

When you are setting up a promotion, the tool will walk you through the process. It will ask you to define your objective by offering you suggestions. It will then walk you through setting up the offer details and then finally it will allow you to add as many listings as you want to the offer. You can then either save it for later or launch it. This tool is easily found in your seller hub under Marketing.

Sales Reports

I use the sales reports to get updates on my total sales and successful listings or sales growth. It is also helpful to track your fees so you can see what you have made in profit.

It is a free tool that you can use to measure your sales performance against your goals, figure out what factors contributed to your successful sales, determine areas of opportunity or improvement and update your selling strategies to lead to better sales performance.

To access this tool, you need to subscribe in your seller hub under Subscriptions.

You can also download a sales tax report from the Seller Hub under Paid and Shipped. The report will show in the separate downloaded section once you have made that selection.

File Exchange

This tool is for high volume sellers who need to upload many listings in bulk and need to manage their inventory. Using templates, this tool gives the buyer the option to create and upload inventory CSV files to add, revise, relist, and end listings. It also can manage post-sales steps like leaving feedback. There is also the option to integrate a SKU to the platform so that you can accurately turn your stock into listings.

On the go? Try selling with the eBay App

This is an easy way to create or manage your listings on the go. If you turn on the notifications in your app center, you will get notification updates on sales, email questions, and any other sales updates that you need to manage. You can also purchase items through the app.

Creating listings from the app is easy. Go to the selling page and click List an Item. If your item has a barcode, it can be scanned from your tablet or phone to make a listing that much easier. You can also take pictures directly from the listing app of each item. No need to hunt for them on your phone. And like most apps, listings sync across all your devices so if you forget to finish it when the bus comes, you can always do it on your laptop later.

Conclusion

eBay has many different tools to make selling as easy and as painless as possible. It is a user friendly, all-inclusive platform that is designed to help you reach and exceed your sales goals.

So, what is stopping you? Get selling!