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I'm writing this on Wednesday, November 24. There are 6 ½ days left in the month. This is noteworthy because today my total November sales on fixed-price venues have drawn almost even with the sales I realized during the entire month of March of this year. March was noteworthy, in turn, because it was a record FPV month for me - by the way, driven largely by the short-lived change eBay made in the search function. In last week's article I attempted to explain this aberration. Yes, it's the holiday season, but November has never been a "best" month for me. January usually tops the annual list, sometimes March, sometimes August. As I mentioned, it seemed that the only plausible explanation was that Stores inventories had plunged since the summer fee hikes, and there were now fewer books competing with mine. Well, something else occurred to me this week (some of you may have seen the story in the forum): I downloaded and installed Google Base Store Connector on November 1. [EDITOR'S NOTE: The above link applies only to eBay US sellers. This may or may not be available yet in other countries.] GSBC publishes your eBay and Amazon Marketplace inventories on Google and/or Froogle. And - guess what? Coincidentally or not, my eBay Stores and Marketplace sales are dominating this month. My Marketplace sales, with the exception of a month I sold a $650 book, are nearly double what they've been in any other month this year, and my Stores sales, with the exception of that aberrant month of March, are already hundreds of dollars over any other month this year. And there's still 6 ½ days to go! Other venues I list on, on the other hand, are showing more or less normal sales. It's difficult to say how much GBSC has contributed to this record month, but there's at least some ability to investigate what's going on. You can click into a "View my items on Google Base" and look at both the number of impressions and clicks you've received for every item in your inventory. (For those of you who aren't familiar with the terminology, an "impression" is an appearance on, in this case, a search results page, and a "click" means that whoever performed the search actually clicked into your item.) Well, in about a dozen cases, items with one or more clicks have indeed sold this month; and in some cases, items with no clicks but multiple impressions have also sold - or I've been emailed questions about them. For me, this is mildly persuasive so far, but we'll see if my improved sales carry over into the coming months. Either way, I'll report back, and meanwhile, if you haven't already done so, it certainly can't hurt to get this thing installed ASAP. It's free and easy to set up. Good luck!
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Contact the editor, Craig Stark editor@bookthink.com Copyright 2003-2011 by BookThink LLC |