FillZ Newsletter

March, 2009

Dear Sellers,

Spring is finally here, which makes it the best time of the year to do some cleaning. If you have old items that haven't been selling, consider having a sale and dropping their prices to see if you can make room on your shelves for new product. If you can't do this manually, contact our Customer Support team for a pricing script to help change your prices.

Marc and Shaun both attended CAMEX this month. They had a great trip, and really enjoyed meeting our campus store FillZ customers. They received some really great feedback on how we can continue to improve our service.

The next Trade Show that FillZ will be attending is the Sellers' Conference for Online Enterpreneurs, which is being held at the Sea-Tac Mariott in Seattle between July 11-13, 2009. For more information about the conference, please check out their new website here.

Textbook sellers: Keep in mind that a mini textbook season began this week for University students who attend schools that offer quarterly semesters (about 20% of Universities in the United States use the quarterly system).

Happy Selling!

Lee-Ann

News

USPS has announced rate changes that will be taking effect on May 11, 2009. For full details, please click here.

TextbooksRus announced a shipping credit increase for expedited orders, beginning on March 30, 2009. This means that sellers on TextbooksRus will have a higher "allowance" for shipping orders to buyers who request expedited shipping. TextbooksRus has also implemented a minimum commission fee of $0.15 per transaction.

New Features

EBay - We've rolled out the new eBay code to all servers! Not only has this improved our integration with eBay, but we can now support eBay's Item Specifics for the conditions in your listings. If you've filled in the new Return Policy area, and the new drop down for Maximum Dispatch Time on the eBay configuration page in FillZ (Settings->Marketplaces->Configuration for eBay), we will also start sending out this data to eBay now.

If your FillZ inventory has less than 10,000 SKUs:
To have eBay update existing listings that are being erroneously displayed as 'acceptable', and to add return and dispatch information, please perform an "Update All" through FillZ anytime after Friday morning. To do this, log into your FillZ account and click on Settings->Marketplaces and click on "Update all" under the heading "Configuration for eBay". Please note that you will then need to click to confirm the Update All.
If your FillZ inventory has more than 10,000 SKUs:
Please contact Customer Support anytime after Friday morning to have an Update All scheduled. It is very important that you DO NOT perform an Update All yourself, as we only have so much bandwidth allotted to us per day for eBay/Half. Doing this could cause major export delays to your eBay/Half account.

Note: An Update All will prompt FillZ to send a modify for all listings that are on EBay. It will not add or delete items on eBay, therefore, it shouldn't incur listing fees.

Run Report - We've added a new report to the Reports page in FillZ. If you click on Reports in the black bar at the top of your FillZ account, you will now see a link that says "Run Reports". If you use this new page you can generate a list online, or to download, that will display a report on your orders. You can specify a time period, and the report will show you how many units sold as well as the total value of the orders (not including shipping). You can also get a further breakdown by SKU.

Bug Fixes

Images - Sellers using Internet Explorer notified us that Amazon images, as well as seller provided images, were being displayed in FillZ with a blank line running through the middle of the images. This has now been corrected.

Address verification - Blank lines in addresses received from some marketplace orders were causing the FillZ address verification tool to fail. We are now removing these blank lines from orders when we receive them.

New Seller Corner

Have you ever seen a listing in your account that showed "Not found - converted to zShop" as the title, and you didn't know what it meant?

This message means that FillZ was unable to grab bibliographic data from Amazon for the item. In order for this type of listing to be sent out to the marketplaces, you will need to fill in the bibliographic details manually (or upload this information).

If you would like your item to appear on Amazon, there are 5 fields that need to be filled in. These fields are Title, Author, Media, Publisher and Publication date.

Wait a minute, FillZ doesn't have a field for publication date when listing items manually. How can I do this?

While FillZ doesn't have a field specifically for this data, you can enter this information into our system when you're editing an item. All you need to do is add a prefix to the Additional UIEE field so we know what the data means, and then you can add the publication date.

Here is an example of what to fill in:

PBYR|1965

For full instructions, please click here.

CS Tip

I don't want to use a pricing script, but I have items that I don't want to be listed on certain marketplaces. How can I do this?

This one is simple! All you need to do is find the items that you wish to prevent from going to a particular marketplace, and add a market specific price of 0.00 for that marketplace. You can do this when creating listings in FillZ using the Single Item page, or you can edit existing items in FillZ by looking them up on the Orders or Inventory pages and clicking on the SKU to get to the editing page.

If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to contact Customer Support.

Referral Program

FillZ rewards clients who refer our business to their friends and associates. Here's how it works:
1. You spread the word about FillZ.
2. A new client references your FillZ user name or store name at sign-up. **It is very important for the new seller to use either of these two identifiers.
3. We credit your account in the amount that the new client pays to FillZ after the first full month of chargeable services.

It's that easy!