Welcome everyone and thanks for joining us today for the "Wholesale Lots" workshop.

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Deirdre
eBay Community Development

EBay’s efforts to support Wholesale Lots

Over the last year or so, we’ve noticed that the amount of wholesale trading activity on the site has begun to increase. Last September, eBay undertook a number of initiatives to support this trend:

• Wholesale Lots Category Structure: To help Wholesale buyers and sellers find each other, eBay improved and expanded the Wholesale category structure. As a result, there are now about 25 different Wholesale Lots categories, located in each of the major categories where Wholesale trading was taking place. This consistent naming and placement should make it easier for re-sellers buyers to find the product they are looking for.



• Wholesale Lots Portal Page: this page brings together links to all of the Wholesale Lots categories on a single page, and provides the opportunity to promote major wholesale events as they occur. You can find this page in a couple of ways. First, you can get there via a link on the eBay home page, located just below the categories list on the left hand side. Second, you can go directly there by typing in Link.



• Promotion: eBay has begun to draw attention to the new Wholesale Lots area through promotion to the community. This has taken place through promotions on the eBay home page, various eBay portal pages, and in selected e-mail communications to buyers and sellers. Watch for this to continue and increase in 2003!

As a buyer, how can you take advantage of Wholesale Lots?

The Wholesale Lots categories offer a great opportunity for re-selling businesses to find new sources of supply. Wholesale Lots on eBay tend to be moderately sized, and very well priced, offering small businesses the chance to get great deals on inventory that they might not normally have access to.

Increasingly, buyers will have the opportunity to source high-quality product directly from manufacturers, distributors, or other large sellers. For example, Motorola runs monthly three-day auctions of cellular phones and accessories (check out: Link ) that are open to the entire eBay community.

It’s easy to find Wholesale Lots. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Click on the “Wholesale” link on the eBay home page. This will take you to the Wholesale Lots portal page, with links to all of the Wholesale categories.


• Go directly to the portal page at Link


• If you know what product category you need, you can click on the category link from the eBay home page, which will take you to that category’s own portal page. From there, look for the link to the “Wholesale Lots” category in the categories box on the left, and that will take you to the Wholesale listings in that category.

Hi jeffs-toys:

Thanks for your questions!

You can utilize all of eBay’s trading formats to sell in Wholesale Lots if you like. If you have a strong sense of what the market value of the lot is, then our fixed price/BIN or Stores formats may be appropriate. I would say, though, that most of our Wholesale sellers prefer to use the auction format to let competition drive the price to its true market value.

For example, sellers who typically negotiate sales of wholesale lots with individual buyers can invite all of their buyers to eBay to participate in a single auction, alongside any other interested members of the eBay community. The combined effect of this is typically a better return for the seller.

Finally, as you probably know, listings in our eBay Stores cost significantly less than listing in auctions or fixed price. However, in exchange for the higher listing fees for auctions, your listings will be searchable and browseable in the core eBay database. If you choose to list Wholesale Lots in a Store only, it will limit the potential audience, making it more important that you are able to attract buyers to those listings in some way, such as merchandising through auction listings, or email marketing to a set of potential customers.

jeffs-toys:

You can put any sort of items into a wholesale lot – it is not required that they are all the same. In fact, many smaller re-sellers will be more attracted to a “mixed lot” consisting of several different SKUs, giving them a greater variety of items to re-sell. I would say this is particularly true for smaller items, like CDs or books.

How to sell in Wholesale Lots

For sellers, the important thing to remember is that each of the Wholesale Lots categories exists under a different eBay product category. So, in order to list in Wholesale Lots, you’ll want to select the product category first, and then find the appropriate Wholesale category beneath it.

For example, here are a few links to some of the Wholesale Lots categories. If you click on these links, you can see how the category structure (which is shown near the top of the page, just above the listings themselves) begins with a main eBay category and then moves to Wholesale Lots:

• Clothing (Link)


• Home Audio & Video (Link)


• Electronic Components (Link)

How do we go about working with eBay category manangers to help promote our Wholesale lots to the eBay community?