The New ebay: The Official Guide to Buying, Selling, Running a Profitable Business

Chapter 32

Reporting

Another key to successful, profitable business is to conduct regular and thorough reports on various aspects of your operation. eBay provides a number of reporting mechanisms to allow you to measure, track and improve your business’s progress.

Selling Manager Pro

Click Reporting in the left navigation area under Selling Manager Pro in My eBay. Here you will be able to download reports going back 18 months into an Excel format for you to save on your computer or print to paper. The reports include a daily breakdown of sales, quantity sold and cost of sales (if you entered cost into your product inventory). You can also choose to report on each of your store categories.

Stores reporting

When you subscribe to an eBay store, you can access two different types of reports. These links can be found under the ‘Reports’ heading in the left navigation area of Manage my store.

Traffic reports are provided by an external party called Omniture (see figure 32.1). Once you have activated your reports (you need to do this every 90 days if you have not used them in the interim), you will be able to view your store’s:

• number of page views — every time a visitor views any of your listings or store pages (data provided is month to date, four weeks prior and previous year)

• visits — the number of single buyers browsing your store pages for 30 minutes or more without a break

• storefront homepage — how many times your homepage was viewed (your homepage is the first page ...