Jillian Entertainment CD & DVD Wholesale Directory

Hello Friend,

I’ve got good news and some bad news.

*** Lets start with the GOOD NEWS!

Most of you know by now that eBay cut CD and DVD sellers
a break in February. They have significantly cut the insertion
fees for sellers listing Books, Music, DVDs, and
Video Games.

If you are listing your items with a starting bid of 99 cents, then
you will see your insertion fees cut in half.

Read more about the cut at this link.
Click Here to Read More…

*** Now there is the BAD NEWS!

eBay increased the Final Value Fee. So now it cost you more
to sell an item than ever before.

For most of us, the amount we save on insertion fees, will
be used to pay the higher FVF. From what I have seen
so far, this new fee structure has been revenue neutral for me.

Read more about the cut at this link.
Click Here to Read More…

*** Now don’t forget about the BEST NEWS!

eBay no longer charges for a gallery image. This is huge news!
I’ve tested adding gallery images to my dvd auctions and they
do provide a significant increase in sales. The problem before was
the extra 35 cents per auction more than offset the increase in
sales.

Now that gallery images are free, most of us should see an
increase of 15 - 20% in our sell through rate.

So by all means, start using the free gallery images. My testing
shows they will only help you.

Read more about the cut at this link.
Click Here to Read More…

Good Luck with your business,

Brent Crouch
http://www.JillianEntertainment.com

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With eBay’s new enforcement of it’s Seller Non-Performance Policy, negative and neutral feedback are a big deal. Being content with a feedback rating of 98% plus is a thing of the past. Now that eBay has started factoring neutral feedback into it’s non-performance algorithm, you have to address every negative and neutral feedback you get.

If you are a high volume seller, you are going to get negatives and neutrals. It doesn’t matter how good your products are and how fast you ship. You can’t please everyone even if you sent them $100 bills for $5 each. Here are the steps I take to avoid eBay’s seller non-performance policy.

Know Where You Stand

The first thing you need to do is find out how your feedback looks for the last 90 days. There is a free tool at Toolhaus that will examine your feedback for the last 90 days and report where you stand. If your negative and neutral feedback is less than 3%, you are probably doing a good job and don’t need to worry. If it is more than 5%, chances are you have already been targeted by the new policy or will be soon.

Dealing with Neutrals and Negatives

Most weeks I ship over 1,000 packages. Mistakes happen. I understand there are times that I deserve a negative or a neutral feedback. I have no problem with this. When this happens, I always write to these buyers and offer an apology and correct any problems that resulted in the bad feedback. Once I am sure the situation has been resolved, I’ll send them a request to withdrawl the negative or neutral feedback. In most cases, this is successful.

There is another aspect of negative and neutral feedback that is not deserved. When I examined the negative and neutral feedback left on my largest account for the last 90 days, I found 75% of it was left by buyers with a rating of 5 or less. Nearly 25% of it was left by buyers with a rating of 1 or less. In my experience, these buyers never write or call about a problem. They are quick to leave feedback for problems that are usually of their own creation. When I examined the account of one buyer that recently left me a negative, I found they had left neutrals and negatives for 6 out of 10 purchases they had made from 10 unique sellers.

I don’t waste a lot of time playing nice with these buyers. In my opinion, they are a problem that eBay should address. At the very least, they should not have any weight in the seller non-performance policy that eBay has started enforcing.

When I determine that a buyer left me negative or neutral feedback and it was undeserved, I always respond with a negative. I usually put something like, “Buyer left bad feedback with no contact about a problem” or something similar. I immediately send a request to withdrawl the negative or neutral feedback. In more than 50% of the cases, I never hear a word and the buyer withdrawls the feedback.

In those cases where a buyer chooses not to communicate and doesn’t withdraw feedback within 7 days, I file a Square Trade case. Square Trade is a mediation company that has the ability to withdraw feedback left on eBay provided both parties agree or one party never responds to the Square Trade emails. In my experience, more than 75% of these dead beat buyers do not respond.

If a buyer doesn’t respond within 14 days, you can pay ST a fee of $30 to review the dispute and contact eBay to remove the comment left for you. I don’t always pay the fee. I am pretty selective about the feedback I pay to withdraw. I’ll usually pay to remove a negative provided there is only one negative per user. In most cases, I never pay to remove a neutral. The only circumstance would be if my 90 day percentage was creeping above 3%. In that case, I might consider it.

I started implementing these techniques over the last 4 months. When I started, my 90 day feedback rating was 1.5% negative and 2% neutral. Currently, I have my rating down to less than 2% negative and neutral feedback for the last 90 days.

Good Luck and Happy eBaying…..

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Ebay has created a new policy known as seller non-performance that is causing lot of good sellers to be suspended. If you haven’t read about this new policy, click on this link and do so right away.

Here are five things you should be doing to make sure you are not one of the good sellers that gets suspended due to this new policy.

1. Don’t try selling import dvds on eBay. In the dvd business, “import dvd” is code word for bootlegs. If you find a supplier advertising DVD-5, DVD9, or import dvds, do not make the mistake of buying them to sell on eBay. If you do, I can guarantee your account will be terminated or suspended.
2. You should answer customer questions within 24 hours. If you don’t have time to meet this commitment, you should really think about hiring some help or running less auctions. I personally feel a response time of 2 - 3 days is acceptable, but I know from experience some buyers expect a response a lot quicker than that. Ultimately these buyers have the ability to effect your feedback rating, and it is better try and please them before you get a negative.
3. You can avoid negative feedback by shipping your items promptly. I personally ship all of my items within 1 business day. Out of thousands of feedback, I have very few complaints regarding shipping.
4. I’m personally a fan of buying used personal collection dvds from eBay and splitting them up and reselling them for a profit. Just be aware there are risks involved when doing this. Used dvds have the potential of having scratches. Unless you are going to check every single movie you plan to sell, (who has that kind of time), you run the risk of shipping a faulty product to your customer. I am always quick to make good on any complaints, but some new buyers will never contact you before leaving bad feedback.
5. Negative and neutral feedback is inevitable. You could sell $100 bills for $10 each and there will be somebody out there that will give you negative feedback for it. Bad feedback is something every high volume seller has to deal with. Once every week, I contact every buyer that left me bad feedback and ask what I can do to make them happy. About half the time, I can come to some type of resolution and the buyer agrees to mutual feedback removal.

If you are going to avoid the problems that come with ebay’s new seller non-performance policy, then you have to be proactive. The old saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure”, rings true when you are dealing with eBay.

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Question: How do you handle people who seem to blitz your site, who buy and do not pay. This has happened to us a number of times. They take a buy it now item remove it from my listing but do not pay. It’s rather annoying. Do you have any solutions for this?

As long as I have been on eBay, I’ve dealt with non-paying bidders. There isn’t a good solution for this problem, but there are a few things that may help.

1. Make sure you are emailing your buyers as soon as the auction ends. Make sure this email has all your payment options and gives an expected time for the shipment. I use eBay’s Seller Manager Pro to send this automatically generated email every time I sell an item.

2. After 7 - 10 days, I always send payment reminders. Make sure this reminder also has your payment options.

3. You can also request contact info for any person that bid on your auction. Just use this link. Ebay User’s Contact Info

Give your bidder a call and remind them to pay.  They’ll most likely be surprised to hear from you.  It will also give you some idea if this is a non-responsible bidder or a competitor that is interfering with your auctions.

4.  If the contact information is false, you should contact eBay right away.  This buyer will be suspended as soon as eBay verifies the contact info themselves.

5.  If I haven’t been paid within 14 days, I always open an Unpaid Items Reminder with eBay and begin filing for a credit.

6.  I never leave a negative feedback for non-paying buyers.  You will most likely get a negative in return.  Now that eBay has started cracking down on sellers, this could lead to a suspension of your account if you get to many.

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***SELLER WITH OVER 1.3 MILLION FEEDBACK***

Can you guess who this CD seller is? They have over 1.3
million positive feedback. Click the Link Below.

Guess Who?

***SELLER BEWARE!***

I’m in no way an eBay basher. I started my business on eBay
several years ago and am grateful for the opportunity they
provided me. But unfortunately, eBay has grown into a huge
bureaucracy and doesn’t always do things the way reasonable
people would expect.

About 6 months ago, eBay decided to rid the site of “bad sellers”.
I think this is a great idea. It creates more business for those of
us who are good sellers.

The problem is the right hand has no idea what the left hand is
doing. Even though this policy went into effect months ago, it
wasn’t actually announced until a few weeks ago.

The other problem is no one knows exactly what is a bad seller.
There have been sellers with 99.5% feedback suspended for
14 - 30 days because they were considered in the bottom 1%.
How does that happen?

There have been reports that 1000’s of sellers have been
suspended. No doubt, some of them needed to go. There are
sellers out there with 80% feedback. I’m not sure why they
weren’t sent packing before now. The problem is there have
been good sellers caught in the mix.

The good news is things are changing. eBay realizes good
sellers have been effected and are making changes to the way
they do things. Here are two very good resources to learn
more about this non-performance policy.

http://tinyurl.com/33bav4

http://tinyurl.com/yqj84k

***FREE LIST OF TOP 10,000 EBAY SELLERS***

I’ve got a lot of questions as to why I was showing a list of top
eBay sellers that dated back to 2004. The answer was simple.
Nobody has created an updated list. That was until now.

A company called Sellathon created a free list of the top 10,000
eBay sellers. It includes a lot of information not available on past
lists. It is simply one of the best resources for finding top sellers
that I have ever seen.

One thing is for sure, cd and dvd sellers dominate the top spots.
Jayandmarie, now have over 1 million feedback. WOW!

You can access the free list using this link.

Jay and Marie

***EXCELLENT EBAY COURSE FOR ONLY 99 CENTS!***

If you are having trouble getting started on eBay, my friends
over at IMC are offering a very complete course on starting
an eBay business for a 99 cent trial.

I’ve heard a lot of great things about the course. I’ve ordered
several products from IMC in the past and have never been
disappointed. If I were starting over on eBay, I wouldn’t
hesitate to take advantage of this offer.

At 99 cents, how can you go wrong?

http://tinyurl.com/32uodm

Good Luck with your business,

Brent Crouch
http://www.JillianEntertainment.com

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A few years ago, I ran several tests on how effective the gallery image is in creating sales. The results showed a gallery image did provide a better sell through rate, but it wasn’t enough of an increase to warrant paying an extra 35 cents for each listing.

I now use an automated program that makes the research a lot easier. I expected to find similar results. What I found, has me reconsidering using the gallery image for my own auctions.

In the month of August 2007, there were a total of 1,405,555 dvd auctions ran without the gallery image. These items had an average sell through rate of 20.58%.

During this same period, there were 443,195 dvd auctions ran with the gallery image. These items produced an average sell through rate of 48.82%. This is more than twice the sell rate of dvd auctions that didn’t use a gallery image.

Lets look at these numbers a little closer.

If you were to run 1,000 dvd auctions, it would cost you an extra $350.00 to add the gallery image to each one. On average, you could expect to sell an extra 282 dvds for purchasing this option.

So should you purchase the gallery image for your dvds? It all depends on how much you profit per dvd. If you only averaged a profit of $1per dvd, you’d be spending $350.00 for gallery images to make an extra $282.00 giving you a loss of $68.00. However, if you are averaging a profit of $2 per dvd, then the gallery option would have made you an extra $214.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to test your auctions and determine if this feature makes sense for you.

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In browsing eBay recently, I see there are huge DVD sellers opertaing there who sell their DVD’s for a penny. They’re charging 3.95 for shipping, and I know the Media Mail cost for shipping 1 DVD is 2.65 these days. So obviously the only place they’re making a profit is from the shipping charge. They can scarcely be making 1.00 profit by the time one allows for ebay and PayPal fees, to say nothing of their own packaging costs. I had hoped to make at least 1.50 each on any DVDs I sell.

My question is this: In order to really compete w/ these “big league” players, won’t I need to price my movies at a penny just as they do, and then have to settle for a buck or less in profits per title sold? Otherwise, it seems there would be no inducement for eBay buyers to buy from me instead of my competition. Am I overlooking something - or will it be necessary for me to accept such meager profits in order to compete?

If you want a lesson on how to compete with the big boys, look no further than Moviemarz. You can read the details in this post. Becoming the top Ebay DVD Seller

Everyone has heard the old saying, “If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck”. Well unfortunately, this isn’t always the case on ebay. A lot of sellers on ebay are selling bootleg titles and trying to pass them off as legitimate. You can’t compete with these sellers on price, but at the end of the day, buyers know the difference. Take a look at any of the auctions closed successfully by Moviemarz. I guarantee you can find 1,000 other auctions for the “same” dvd that sold for far less, but for some reason that buyer chose to pay more and buy from a legitimate seller.

Now there are some legitimate sellers offering 1 cent CDs and DVDs. Jayandmarie are a good example of this. But keep in mind, in most cases they are not offering new product. Most of the product they sell is used and bids up well past the starting fee of 1 cents.

Here is the strategy I use to price my dvds.

Pricing my dvd to sell

Good Luck,

Brent Crouch

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Question: One of the questions I wanted to ask considering the most two popular auction & Marketplace are Ebay & Amazon, Which one is better marketplace to sell DVD or any Hot items in terms of profitablity/Cost(Amazon’s Commission is higher than Ebay’s combined fees including paypal), probablity of an item selling, ease of listing(Amazon does not offer product page creation for normal seller account) etc.? Also which marketplace would you choose to create a STORE if you have to? Any other differentiating attributes you can think of? What is your experience?

When I started my business, I sold exclusively on Ebay. A dvd is sold on ebay every 3 seconds. Consumers spend an average of 11 million dollars a month on single dvds sold on ebay. It isn’t an accident that the top ebay sellers offer dvds.

A couple of years ago, I was invited by Amazon to list my products on their site. I was very reluctant. I had already wasted a lot of time trying to sell on Yahoo Auctions, Overstock.com, and a few others. These ventures turned out to be a waste of time. There was no other site able to provide the number of buyers I was getting from ebay.

After a few phone calls from Amazon, I finally agreed and took the time to list a few items. I was surprised a few days later to notice they actually sold! I listed more items with the same success. Amazon proved to be well worth my time. This year, I will do six figure revenue from Amazon.

I like Amazon because I don’t have to pay a listing fee. I pay a flat 15% of the sales price plus shipping and handling. This is a great benefit when you get stuck with titles that just won’t sell.

If I were starting my business all over, I’d have my products on ebay and amazon. I’ve talked to a few sellers that have had good results from half.com. Personally, I don’t have any experience with that site.

Why limit yourself to just an ebay or just an amazon store? Why not open a store on both sites once your inventory level is large enough to support both venues.

Good Luck,

Brent Crouch

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Question: Could you please tell me if the DVDs from the USA are the same format as the UK so they will play on UK dvd players as it will be the uk Market that I will be selling to.

There are 8 region codes used by dvd manufacturers. In the United States, our dvd players are configured to play dvds sold as region 1. In the UK, the dvd players sold are configured for region 2 dvds. You can’t play a region 1 dvd in a dvd player configured for anything other than region 1. So basically, you can’t order dvds from a region 1 dvd wholesaler, and plan to sell them to customers with region 2 dvd players.

My list contains a handful of UK suppliers in addition to the top supplier for the UK market. You can get more info at the following link. UK Dvd Supplier

I also found a very good article on dvd coding. It is worth reading and can be found at the link below. DVD Region Coding

Good Luck,

Brent Crouch

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Question: I explained a few days ago that I have been approved by ***EDITED*** to purchase videos.

I received a call yesterday from one of their reps about methods of payment. It seems that credit cards, or a debit card are the cheapest ways to pay… however, they asked for a copy of my debit card. I feel this to be a very unusual request. I’ve had my account compromised in the past with unauthorized use.

I’ve never been asked for a copy of any credit card before.

You state that you’ve had experience with this company. Is this a common request from ***EDITED***, or any other supplier you deal with? I would like your opinion on this.

I’ll hold off on sending the copy until I hear from you…

I’m not going to recommend you give your card to anyone if you don’t feel comfortable. I don’t have a credit card on file with this company. I pay for my orders using COD as they arrive at my business. This may be an option for you to discuss with your rep.

Personally, if I decided to use a credit card for payment, I wouldn’t have any problem sending a copy to ***EDITED***. They are the second largest dvd wholesaler in the country. I don’t know if there is much difference in giving a supplier your credit card number and sending them a copy, other than a copy allows them to verify you actually have the card in your possession. It is most likely a safeguard for them to prevent unauthorized card use.

Another option you can consider is giving them a credit card versus a debit card. If someone makes an unauthorized charge on your debit card, the money is immediately withdrawn from your bank account. It can take months to get this money replaced. You can completely avoid this problem by using a credit card.

Good Luck,

Brent Crouch

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