How do small niche sellers scale internationally - without a store, without a team, and without Amazon pressure? In this episode, Ingrid speaks with Isabell Butterwegge from eBay and Kim Mooney, founder of Uncanny Collectibles in Ireland. Kim explains why internationalisation wasn’t a “nice to have” but a survival strategy. And Isabell shares how eBay data like the Export Matrix and Product Research Tool help sellers identify real demand: France strong in Arts & Antiques, Spain and Italy in Lego and watches, and Germany now one of Kim’s most important markets. They discuss why Kim stepped away from Amazon, how eBay Mag automates her international listings, and why data-driven cross-border expansion is often easier than many expect. A concise episode about pragmatic growth - and how the right setup can take you from a spare bedroom to a global customer base.

Note from the sponsor Pixelmoda:

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I used to sell on Amazon and pre Brexit.

It was fantastic.

Again it was set and forget chuck everything into a box with a barcode on it and let them dispatch it.

And fulfilled by Amazon was absolutely amazing until Brexit happened.

And then what you started seeing as brands are quite entitled to, so say brands that I would sell, they started locking down and gatekeeping their brands because there was too many fakes that were happening.

Let's Talk Marketplace.

The Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lohmer and Vana Vichte.

Hello everyone and welcome back to let's Talk Marketplace.

We're here again just me as it will be for the next few months because I think you have heard in the last episode, my dear co founder Valerie is pregnant.

And so she will be off on Maternity Live for a few months.

But never worry.

I have stacked a whole lot of great guests that I can share with you over these months.

So you don't have to listen to me just on my own.

And yeah, starting today I already have two great guests with me because I wanted to talk a bit about one of my most favorite topics actually, which is internationalization.

I love talking about that and specifically about how to internationalize on a marketplace that sort of wrote a book on it, I think you can say, and that is ebay.

And with us from ebay is Isabel.

Hi Isabel, it's great to have you back.

We saw each other last, I think, what was it, April May for our joint webinar on cross border trade.

And that was great.

So.

So yeah, introduce yourself to our listeners.

Yeah, happy to be back in a way.

Thank you for the invitation, Ingrid.

I'm Isabelle, I'm from ebay and I'm now with ebay since almost seven years.

Time is definitely flying.

I'm part of the seller and brand engagement team in ebay Germany and I look after basically everything that is related to go to market activities around D2C.

So everything that we are publishing for our business sellers for ebay Germany.

It's where our team is basically included.

Okay, right, great.

And so you're just the right person to tell us more about what ebay is doing for international sellers.

And also here to sort of challenge what you're going to say regarding the day to day daily seller business is Kim.

Kim, hi.

It's really great to have you with us and why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself as well.

Hi.

Hi ladies.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm Kim Mooney.

I am a small business owner here in Ireland.

And my company name is Uncanny Collectibles and I'm eight years doing this.

And what Uncanny Collectibles does is it takes its name from.

In case you can't tell, I'm a massive geek, it takes its name from X Men because I love selling toys and action figures and just trying to help people reconnect with those little things that you couldn't get when you were a kid.

So whether it be vintage Star wars, whether it be mask toys, whether it be more modern stuff like horror, which is my absolute jam right now, that's what I sell and that's my bread and butter.

That's my day to day thing.

And it's a long way from when I used to work in a bank 13 years ago.

So I was there, I felt like I was losing my soul and started this up and here I am eight years later.

That's.

Yeah, that's quite a shift.

A big shift.

A big shift.

Okay.

So letting out your inner geek with your own shop and on ebay as well and on other marketplaces too.

Oh, 100%.

So I have my own store is it started literally just as an online store only here in Ireland.

I don't know if I don't know what it's like in other countries.

I'm sure it's the same but it is almost impossible to get something to rent as a storefront here.

The rents are absolutely crazy.

Between the rents, the rates, the insurance, it's a massive, massive risk.

So this all started in my, in my bedroom, my spare room that to this day I still don't really see.

You know there's still a lot of stock in there but genuinely thanks to selling online, selling to Eve, selling on ebay and even co was actually super friendly in, in terms of actually helping grow my business.

So I, I moved from it being in the bedroom to I have a. I'm a business inside of a business now in a storage facility that's like acts as a warehouse and that's my main place of operations for people to come in and visit.

That's as a kind of a makeshift shop for dispatching orders worldwide.

So there's ebay, there's.

I did do Amazon but don't like that anymore.

I refuse to do vintage.

That's a new one but that's an interesting one.

I use another company here in Ireland called Adverts ie do dabble a little bit with Facebook Marketplace but ebay and my own website and in shows are my main channels that I would use.

Right, interesting.

So Isabella, I Guess you brought a seller that goes right into the heart of ebay with the collectibles and the geeky great stuff that you can't find anywhere else.

So before we go, you know, into business, let's geek out a bit and because I always like to finish up and find out more about my guests with a little fun fact question.

But in this case I'd like to twist it a bit because Kim, I can already tell the two of us can go along geeking forever because massive D and D geek and Star Trek geek.

And yeah, nice.

Geeking is my thing.

So you said horror.

So what is your main thing at the moment?

If you go, oh my God.

So Fred, you've got the 80s slashers.

So you have your, your Jason's, your Jason Voorhees From Friday the 13th, you have your Michael Myers.

More modern slashers is Arthur Clown from Terrifier.

He is, I'm telling you now, anyone who stalks him right now is just making crazy money.

You cannot keep him in stock for anything.

He is doing amazing.

He's just a modern slasher.

And the fact that he's so silent and it's all expressive is just absolutely fantastic.

So horror.

Because here in Ireland it was never really a thing.

You could never really get anything horror.

And I'll never forget when I was a kid, I shouldn't have been doing it.

I was watching an old black and white TV at 2 o' clock in the morning and the Evil Dead 2 came on.

And that's what, that's what sold it for me.

There's a little part in that where Ash goes insane, where the moose starts talking to him and his hand starts becoming possessed.

And it was just one of those things you should not be doing.

And it was just absolutely.

I was just hooked at that point.

So when I started my business, I wanted to bring that and bring that to other horror collectors there because there was no market for us, really.

Yeah, I can see that.

So, Isabella, can you geek with us?

Is there anything that you would go for the collect?

If you're looking on the collectible site.

On ebay, it's definitely becoming Pokemon cards on my end.

You might have heard that we just launched ebay live in Germany.

And I have to admit, since we're testing and going through the beta phase, it didn't just stay with one Pokemon card purchase.

So, yeah, it's basically coming one Pokemon package per week almost.

But I can't geek with you, so.

I could fully follow Kim about, about.

The things that you just shared.

But it sounds super hyped.

So I'm happy that you both can connect on it.

That's fine.

I can co connect for the Pokemon part as well.

I got two boys, they're out of the Pokemon phase by now, but they have been in it for quite a while.

So yeah, I can relate to that.

Yeah.

Great.

So I guess we'll be talking a lot about collectibles and how they are really present on ebay and also about how to bring that to an international audience on the platform.

Great to have you both here and we'll get right into it after a very short advertising break.

In which I wanted to tell you a little bit about our partner, PixelModa.

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So we've got a webinar on this.

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And there we'll have Gianni Sarazi, the president of PixelModer, with us and he will show us how brands can increase sales with better visuals, reduce returns and production costs and scale content seemingly across marketplaces and everything.

And what all that has to do with AI generated imagery and what you can do with AI and what you can't do with AI will all be part of that session on December 2nd from 11am so why not join?

You'll find the registration link in the show notes.

Okay ladies, let's go in and talk about collectibles and internationalization.

Maybe first can you give us a little lookout?

What does your business look like?

You already touched upon it a bit, told us about the marketplaces you're active on, but now let's look at it from the international perspective.

Where are you selling and which marketplaces are you present?

So my main website is mostly Irish based and it was based on say Woocommerce up until recently when I was just getting absolutely bogged down with.

Woocommerce is absolutely Amazing if you're starting out.

But eight years later, there was too much that I needed on it and there's too much time being spent developing, fixing problems in, in the technical back end, losing, losing time.

And one of the things that I love about ebay is they gave me an account manager during COVID and he's Dutch.

I have to shout out to Johan because he's absolutely amazing.

And he literally gives out to me in a friendly way saying, kim, you're doing too much.

You need to get a red card system in there and just stop and focus on these things.

So from having literally just as a sole trader, you probably know yourself when you're doing everything yourself, you just get caught up.

So he introduced me.

Sorry, a previous account manager called Jamie introduced me to ebay mag.

Megan who came along then, she literally taught me all about ebay mag.

And the fact that we can now take it from it was on WooCommerce and it was connected via a plugin called WP Lister.

So it takes it from the website WooCommerce without having to do all these manual extra uploadings and post puts it into ebay Ireland.

Then from ebay Ireland, it would cross post it into ebay mag, where, I don't know, I can only speak for myself.

My linguistic skills are absolutely terrible.

I cannot learn anything.

Even with Google Translate, I am terrible.

And I love the fact that ebaymag is literally translating stuff for me into native languages and currencies.

So in the beginning it was most of the sales were coming from ebay Australia, ebay, Canada and eBay USA, with some residuals coming from France, Germany and Italy.

And now because of the world that we're in, where the American market is essentially shut off, it's shut itself off.

I found that a lot of Europeans are looking for more European sellers.

So ebay mag has been absolutely fantastic in terms of helping me reach those people in those languages in those currencies.

So my biggest markets right now, where it used to be Australia and America, is now Germany, France and Italy.

Great.

Okay, let's take a little step back because you dove right into ebaymag.

But Isabelle, maybe you would like to explain to our listeners what eBayMac is and what that program contains.

Yeah, it's actually not a program, it's rather a tool that we are offering for all our sellers and it's a tool that takes the translation efforts from you.

So taking another step back, how international shipping or international selling on ebay works is that you basically have two options the first one is we call it passive cbt.

So passive cross border trade where you just have a local listing on your domestic site and you just add the international shipping options about the countries where you want to sell to.

And the second option is that you're actively going to the ebay site where you want to list your item.

And in the second option you have to take the full translation efforts and basically create a new listing on those sites.

And what eBayMag does is basically the transformation from a passive listing to an active one.

So you just have your domestic listing in your native language and you go to ebaymac.

It's actually also ebaymac.com where you can access it and there you can choose which listings you want to sell to which sites.

Just a tip there it makes sense to fulfill your business policies before you go to eBayMac because it just simplifies the process overall.

But then in eBayMag you can select the listings and the countries you want to sell to.

And eBayMag takes the translation from your shoulders, it translates and fully localizes the listings.

Meaning also Kim was just saying she was sending to Australia and us which obviously also has a different currency.

So even Mac techs also care of that.

But you always have the full control.

So even if you are into languages, you can still do some adjustments and titles or item descriptions or even in prices.

Okay, so that's quite a full offer that you have here with this tool.

Kim, would you say anything is missing from the tool?

What would you still like to see or what would help you.

Like additude?

Nothing is ever is ever truly perfect, no matter whether it be.

There was a previous one that I was working.

God, for the life of me I cannot remember the name of it.

It was before ebay Mag and it was costing me €100amonth just in.

In doing exactly what eBay Mac does.

And eBay Mag at the time would say five, six years ago was not.

It was not at the races.

It could not do what these other paid plugins were starting to do you.

It has increased in functionality in leaps and bounds.

It's still not perfect, but it's a free tool that increases your sales.

That's absolutely fantastic.

So as a small business owner, you're constantly looking at the bottom line.

You're looking to try and see where can I cut corners, what's the best way to do it.

So in terms of, as Isabelle said, there is some functionality there where it does tend to go off and make up even though you have Your policies set.

It decides to make its own policies and kind of overrides here and there.

There has been some capacity issues with it as well but that is something that I'm.

I'm aware that they are working on and I think like at the moment my ebay mag can only do say Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Canada and usa.

But there's other ebays out there like Poland, Switzerland, Netherlands if you could get those in there.

So I have within Shopify now.

So I use Shopify to ebay, ebay, ebay to ebay Mag and now ebay mag then feeds into another plugin that I've used called M2E channel that should I ever decide to sell on Tick Tock Shop or Amazon or something like that, that again is a plug in that can just connect in my stock and my inventory into all them.

But the weird combination of all three.

So my website, eBay Mag and M2E has just made my actual international sales explode which is something that here in Ireland you shouldn't just be focusing on just selling in Ireland.

I, I would not survive as business if I just did that.

So having that tool that is free to.

Well sorry it's free when you're within the business plan is absolutely fantastic.

Isabella, is this then something that you heard before what Kim is saying that she now that ebaymax is opening up this opportunities to do internationalization in a relatively easy way that this helps sellers really explode their business?

Yes, it's something that we hear the capacity issues that Kim was just mentioning is something that the team has been worked really hard on.

EBayMag runs quite smoothly.

When you exceed the 5k it still works, just the loading times are increasing.

It's a tool for free but if you have tons of listings you should bring some some patience until everything is fully going through.

Especially when you just start ebaymac and you decide to push like 10 100k or even more listings.

So that's definitely also a recommendation from my end.

And yes, what Kim just said is also what we're hearing from other sellers.

So there are here and there a few hiccups which is I think something that happens in all technical systems.

But yeah, as I said it's something for free which definitely reduces the costs of entering a new market.

Especially when you are just about to start and are not sure if you fully want to enter to a new market.

And it's a great tool where you can just test and learn.

Kim how are you addressing these marketplaces, these different markets?

Are you going for different assortments in different markets?

Are you just offering everything you have to all people who are interested in every country or is there anything that you are.

Yeah, localizing in a way.

I don't have the skills to localize.

I let ebay Mike do that.

Okay.

But in terms of like what I would see in different areas.

So France absolutely loves vintage, proper, real vintage, Star Wars.

They absolutely love that.

So if I'm pushing through ebay mag, as Isabella said, I will make sure that those.

I will focus in on getting those ebay mag listings into France first for say Thunderbirds, which is very.

Thunderbirds is a huge thing here in, in Ireland, in the UK but the market is flooded with them, so we have no interest in them.

But yet the Netherlands and Australia and Germany loves Thunderbirds.

So it's very interesting to see, even though when I list it's just kind of in theory, just goes out to everybody with no localization done.

But it's very interesting just to see the differences between each market and what the tastes are in that regard.

So it's, it's a great tool.

Again, it can always be improved.

Everything, no matter what it is, whether it's free or paid, there's always some sort of refinement that can be done.

But it's.

It's absolutely fantastic just to set and forget.

That's the big thing for me is I want the automation.

I want to set, forget and just know it's running in the background.

Yeah, set and forget is a very good point here, I think, for many sellers because you've got so many other things on your table and don't want to worry about operations.

Isabelle, I know that ebay is also, apart from the great tool that you're offering, is giving sellers advice and some strategic input and where to go and which markets to.

To focus on and which categories are working well in what countries and stuff like that.

So can you give us some insights here?

What can you offer sellers and do you have maybe some examples?

You mean offering sellers in terms of which insights?

Yeah, just an Insights.

Yeah, yeah.

On Insights, we do have an internal tool that is called product research.

It's also part of the seller hub or in Germany Pro, where sellers can go to and actually also select the site where they are interested to look into and there I can just look for my items.

Obviously it's a little bit manual, but it's a good tool to see the demand and the prices your items are being sold to and it helps you a little bit better to get the understanding of the different international ebay sites.

Something that we are also aware is that sellers are lacking a little bit the understanding of where actually is the demand for my item but it's not really covered yet.

So basically where's the gap of demand and products that are already being offered?

And that's why we have launched the so called export matrix.

So we actually looked through our different categories per market and did an analysis of where are buyers searching for items but actually not really finding them yet.

And where do we already see those items already being listed on other markets?

Maybe it's something that we can link into the show Notes.

Happy to share the link.

I don't want to go all through all the markets in different categories now, but it's also something that we are offering for sellers to just give them an indication and maybe to also add on that.

I mean obviously resources like this ones are also some that we are offering to our sellers where we are just sharing our insights and maybe to just share a few like top export matrix, not matrix top export markets where sellers are actually selling to.

We saw that especially looking into international sales that Italy, Austria, France, Spain and also the UK are really top ranking when it comes to receiving international sales.

So basically where buyers are also quite open for exported items.

And that's also always something to consider.

But obviously that depends on the category you're selling in.

But overall those are the top five markets that we are seeing where sellers are actually selling to.

Interesting to see UK on there because it's not that easy to receive products from outside the UK at the moment there.

So but still obviously consumers don't mind, so it seems.

So yeah, that's.

That's really great insights that you have there with the product research tool.

Maybe some examples on some categories in some markets that like it very much.

So maybe some something in the way we can go a bit deeper and just give a hint on what insights we can find on it.

Yeah, maybe we can.

I can take a look at collectibles as we are now having seen here we see that actually Pokemon cards demanded in Spain, France, Italy and UK and arts and antiques are rather high performing in France and also the UK.

And when we look into more like playing stuff, for example into Lego, we see that Spain and Italy are quite high, high on the list.

And for example for fashion, if we look into that category we see that Spain and Italy are quite demanding for watches specifically.

So we can see also the trend of Italy, Spain and The UK across categories, kind of.

But yeah, there's still like nuances in terms of the categories.

That's really a cool tool.

Absolutely.

Kim, have you been using that one as well already?

I. I do, but what I'll quantify the way I use it is that eBay Ireland actually doesn't have that tool.

I have to log on to.

So the smaller eBay.

So eBay, Ireland, Austria and I think Belgium, we don't have a lot of the tools that the bigger eBay is like.com UK and Germany have.

And if I was to use it, I have to log on to eBay UK which is.

Which is fine.

But it does kind of skew the pricing in terms of.

So say if I have a really.

So recently I was looking up the.

The.

And I'm trying to get a reading on it.

And it's all I'm really seeing is kind of in.

In Sterling.

And okay, I'll know what Irish people will pay.

I'll know what kind of.

From looking at.

I'll kind of know what the kind of threshold is for Europeans to pay to kind of see some of the results there.

In.

In sterling kind of throws you a little bit.

Now you do eventually kind of get used to it.

You do a little bit of mental maths and you're like, okay, you know, 80 quid is about this.

And it is absolutely fantastic to have something too like that and just even see.

So you can, you can drill down into it, you can go in, you can actually use it for keyword research.

Which was something that one of my account managers had me do, which was why are my items not selling well?

It was because I didn't have it written in the way the top.

The product titles written in the way that people are searching on ebay.

And that in itself is an.

Is an eye opener when you use a tool like that.

And then to even see the actual sales, the actual asking price versus the sold price over a period of whether it be 21 days, 30 days, three months, the last three years.

It's a fantastic tool to get, especially when you start seeing that there is other tools out there that will give you this information, but they charge you for it.

So to have access to this, again as a small business owner is absolutely fantastic.

So what would you do with the information if you see your Rancor is selling in Spain for, I don't know, €80 and it would sell just for 60 in Germany, would you change the prices for each country again.

I'm going to go back to my set and forget I'm lazy.

Right.

Let's be honest, I have so much going on at this point.

So I know from say when I was setting up ebay mag, what I looked at was what's the actual ebay fees that I'm losing per market and what is the average asking price that I'm selling stuff for?

So based on that, I threw it in.

I used.

God, I used my brain before, before AI came along, I used my brain and I kind of put all this into Google sheets, came up with a formula and then when I list on ebay mag I'll set it that each marketplace is.

The asking price is say 10%, 20% or 30% above my base website asking price.

Now I will also mark it a little bit higher which is a weird trick that I got from talking to other sellers.

I will mark it up a little bit higher than what I actually want because then I can enable best offer.

And it's very interesting to see what I might have thought was oh, I'll just put it up say for €25 or best offer.

But if someone say to me put it up for 35 and you're thinking, Jesus, that's a bit, that's a bit much now.

But there will be somebody that will come along and offer you 30 instead of the 25 that you were looking for.

So it's very.

Never assume that you kind of know the buyer's purchasing power I guess is the best way to answer that question.

Yeah, and pain point in a way.

So yeah, that's interesting how you do that.

So Isabel, is that something that you've heard from other sellers before or is that I don't know the Kim set and forget brand on how to use this?

I, I have heard it from, from a few other sellers also on their domestic listings actually.

So not really just in, in terms of international selling, but what I also heard from from other sellers and sorry Kim, is that they are doing frequent analysis, are frequent, are doing frequent price adjustments and are basically just updating their systems from time to time just to be basically on, on, on the latest state of what the prices actually are.

So I would say it really depends on, on the strategy and where you want to focus your energy on.

But yeah, we definitely also see sellers who are really strategically focused on updating their prices almost on, on a daily basis.

But as you heard, just heard from Kim, it's not a must and there's.

Always.

A trade off, trade off when you Just do, do best offer.

What I also heard from one seller is that he said he just has so many listings and he went back to the auction style.

So he's just putting everything, I think, for €10 across the globe, just doing auctions.

So he's also trading collectible stuff.

So always has just one item in stock, basically from every listing.

And he says in the end it's just.

It's just math.

Sometimes he gets hundreds of euros for items also from.

From France or it.

We never expected someone actually buying, like, old, old stuff.

Yeah.

So in the end, it's just a calculation thing that sellers have to decide for their business.

Yeah.

And just to add on to that as well, from.

I suppose if I.

If we.

If Ireland was part, physically part of the eu, it would actually for me to buy stock in so much cheaper.

So the reason that I wouldn't say look at the.

The pricing and adjust it is one, I'm lazy.

But two, also because it does actually cost us, say, Irish sellers, because we're on an island.

It.

It does cost us that bit more to physically get it from point A to point B and then to send it from point B back into Europe.

So it's absolutely like, I know when I was using Amazon, they would really drill into you that you have to be the best price every single time.

And it was almost like a race to the bottom.

However, I love the fact that I have the freedom to choose what way that I want to do it.

Do I want to do the race at the bottom or do I want to just set, forget and be lazy and kind of let that kind of tune to my business style?

It's.

The options that you have is brilliant.

Yeah, that's.

That's really great.

What.

And also what Isabel, you said with the idea of the seller to just go back to two auctions, because that is working best for.

For him, that is just that, freedom of choice.

And how you.

How you do your business.

As you've been talking about being an island and how that affects your costs, let's turn the conversation a bit to the point of shipping, because this is a big part of internationalization.

Bless you, Isola.

So, Kim, how are you doing that?

Are you shipping everything by yourself?

Do you have a provider?

What are you.

How are you doing it?

So it's actually a bit of a pathway.

So as.

As a lot of small businesses know out there, a lot of the pricing that you get.

So if you're reaching out to your local postal provider, the first things that they will ask you is what volume are you sending and you're not going to get as when you're starting out, you're not going to get great packages and prices because your volume is going to be like realistically here what they're looking for is a minimum of 5,000 packages per year going through their dedicated network.

So in the beginning, ebay, Ireland actually has packlink attached to it and I could actually be very cheeky and I could actually log in.

I discovered this by pure chance.

I could log in if I had made a sale on my own website.

I could still access the pack link ebay prices and send my package out from my website using ebay pricing because it had that, that thing there.

So it was absolutely fantastic.

But that only worked for Ireland.

I couldn't use it for international shipping.

So then because of my actual sales started growing, growing, growing and then I was able to.

One of the things that you have to keep, keep on top of is when you're negotiating these prices, you have to know what's your average dimensions, what's how many packages, what's the weight, where are they going to.

So once I started having the volume, I was able to reach out to these companies and I've been through our official government carrier on post, who are fantastic.

And then I went to a couple of other courier companies that some would only kind of specialize in Ireland and the UK and then others were all over the place.

And finally I've actually weirdly settled on ups and before I would have dismissed them, but they're literally giving me free boxes.

I was spending 2,300€ a month on boxes.

In part of their actual package, they're giving me free boxes that covers the majority of my stuff.

So that's.

Even though they seemed a bit more expensive, the cost saving was actually there.

On top of that, they're saving me time by physically coming to my warehouse and picking up.

So I'm, I'm saving time having to.

Instead of printing off labels and going to the post office and losing two hours a day, they're coming, picking it up and there's full transparency in terms of where it's going, how it's been delivered.

My actual losses for say, items not received on time, packages gone missing completely have.

They're pretty much the like.

I actually have one at the moment where the UPS has actually delivered physically the wrong package to the customer and the customer is actually really sound.

He's lovely.

But there's an open investigation going on to find out how that happened because the customer still hasn't got his package, but that's very, very rare.

So what I would say to people is you need to look at not the cheapest doesn't necessarily mean the best.

Because when I started out, there's one company that I used and they lost 25% of my packages in three months and nearly killed my business.

Ouch.

Yeah, that's hot.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

I absolutely agree on that.

So, Isabelle, I know that ebay is also off offering some shipping opportunities, logistics opportunities for their sellers.

So maybe you want to go into that a bit.

Yeah, yeah, happy to do so.

So it depends a little bit, at least for now, on the market where you're actually located.

For example, in some markets we do have ebay international shipping available in uk we do have the global shipping platform available.

So it depends a little bit on where you are located and what you want to get out of it.

We do have, as Kim said, the pack link opportunity available in the most of our European markets.

So basically you just go to the platform and choose your label from the shipping provider you want to get your items being shipped from.

And we also do have for our German markets, a label platform available where they can also choose where they want their labels basically being shipped from.

Maybe just to add on what Kim just said, independently of what provider you're choosing, you always should be careful in adding shipping tracking information because that is how we are protecting you as a seller.

And this is how you can ensure that our seller protection actually applies for your.

For your shipment.

It's not really a difference from your domestic shipping.

So our seller protection also comes in when you're shipping internationally.

It's just that you have to have really this, this tracking information to make us able to decide on the cases.

Okay.

I have to look a bit at the time because it is running out, but I do want to touch upon two subject subjects that always come up when I talk to international or brands and retailers who are telling me that they can't go international because they.

These are the main problems.

And this is customer service and returns and maybe start out the customer service because you can say that ebay customers do have a bit of a reputation on that they tend to contact the customer service a bit more often than on aftermarket places.

So how does that work out with international customers?

Kim, you said you're not great with languages, so how do you deal with that?

Weirdly, ebay has a fantastic.

Not weirdly that they have it, but they actually have a translation tool.

So current, since they've done the Update to the the actual chat function.

Before it used to be just email, used to be email messages, but now it's like a live chat.

And so you in Italy could send me a message in Italian and it automatically lands on my messages as in English, which is fantastic.

That only weirdly works on desktop, doesn't work on mobile at the moment.

And I don't know if it's just my customer base.

I have to kind of disagree in terms of what you're saying about ebay customers having a bad reputation.

Touch wood.

I've only had one nightmare customer and that was recently.

But I haven't had that.

And I think that's because when I worked in the bank I actually worked in customer complaints.

So I don't know if that's me just knowing, taking that knowledge and placing it, making sure that I kind of give almost too much information in my listings to cover all bases versus somebody who's just, you know, if you're just taking a picture, a single picture front and back of a collectible and you're looking for €400 for something like that, you're gonna run into problems.

Whereas if you literally take the time to take, it doesn't matter if it's a €10 item or if it's a €400 item, if it's pre owned, you need to be taking the time to take the product, describe it accurately, take the product listings photos and put accurate information into your listing.

Because if you don't do that, that's when you're going to lose your case on item not described or you know it's faulty or something along those lines.

So I again, I don't know if that's just I've been lucky or if that's just the way I do business.

But I have not had those apart from that one guy recently.

I haven't had those nightmare scenarios because of that.

Okay, absolutely agree on product listings have to be 100% so that you avoid all that problems.

But still, Isabelle, you know where that reputation is coming from and what I'm talking about.

There's a lot of going on sometimes in some, especially in some categories.

So.

But what would you say to retailers that say I can't sell internationally because this is going to be such a huge problem?

I would say the German customers are always a little bit more tricky than comparing other markets.

So I would say if you're a German seller and you can already deal with a German, you should be good to go internationally.

Maybe that's the first, first point and and the second one is, as Kim already said, like we just launched this translation functionality within our M2M so member to member communications.

But I know that many sellers are actually, actually not touching that because they're managing their customer services from the 3pp.

For those, I would say in times of AI it should become easier and easier to have a good conversation with your buyers in their native language.

And that's probably also the point.

Maybe you should start also then communicating in their language just to make a step towards them and not having them translating your messages.

And the second one is if there are any problems and you have to contact the ebay customer service, maybe that's a good call out that usually the customer service of the buyer side is the one that is in charge of your case in that case.

But if you're unsure, like who is really now talking to me, you can help me.

You can always contact your local customer service and they should be able to direct you to the, to the right point of contact and those should be able to help you if there are any cases where you said you are having a terrible buyer and can't really find a solution.

Okay, right, final point that would be returns and maybe also, you know, missing payments, anything that goes wrong.

Kim, would you say that this is more difficult if you're going international or is that just the same thing as ever?

To be honest, no.

Where I actually had I used to sell on Amazon pre Brexit and it was fantastic.

It was fantastic again it was set and forget chuck everything into a box with a barcode on it, let them dispatch it and fulfilled by Amazon was absolutely amazing until Brexit happened.

And then what you start seeing as brands are quite entitled to, so say brands that I would sell, they started locking down and gatekeeping their, their brands because.

Because there's too many fakes that were happening and I actually found that the majority of my returns and my losses from customers.

So that's me including me doing physical shows where, you know, it might be easy for people to pick something up and just walk away or you know, somebody in theory over the post they could try and defraud you.

Most of my losses were coming from Amazon and it was from people abusing the Amazon policies and I had to stop doing it selling on Amazon because of that reason because I wasn't getting the help or support.

And that was before the times of AI, before they had AI agents and stuff like that in I had to stop because it just wasn't worth it and it just, they made it Just so cumbersome to try and stop your business making losses that you knew were, you know, were fake.

Now in times where you do mess up on your own, like by all means, my bit of advice is if you mess up, just it's not worth a bad feedback.

Depending on the price, work with the buyer and just get that.

You know, I find most people are actually very with that one exception recently that most people are very.

They're grand is what I would say.

They're very nice and once you work with them and you make it easy for them, you can either get a partial refund, you can do a full refund.

For me though, I haven't I think just touching back to the way that I list things.

I touch, touch wood.

I don't have that many issues but when they do pop up, I just find acknowledging the customer's pain point and dealing with it as like don't be let let let you know their questions, sit there for two, three days because that's where you're going to run into issues.

You have to respond to this regardless of what language it's in.

You have to respond to it as soon as possible.

Isabella, anything to add on that matter?

Yeah, maybe just since we launched that we're managing the payments also the like lack of payments, payment cases really went to zero.

So ebay is managing the payments also internationally and maybe just a recommendation in terms of when you're entering the new market and you're unsure how to deal with returns, always work with your lawyer to also meet the regulations in the market you're entering.

In Germany we do have a 14 day period where you have to accept returns.

It might be different in other markets but just remember that you, as Kim said, have good setup standards, offering a good service, be transparent and and then you should be good, good to go.

Yeah, I guess I'll take that as the final word here.

Thank you very much, Isabelle.

Thank you Kim for your insights and your great take on how to sell collectibles internationally.

Thanks for ladies for joining me today.

That was very entertaining and very insightful.

Thank you for being with me.

Thank you so much for having us.

Yeah, thank you so much and thank you.

Right next week if you want to join us again, I'll be happy to welcome you.

And we will have a special on the black week on Amazon in that case and answer the question, is that all?

Is that still working for everyone Black week or should you maybe discard it?

We'll see about that.

And we'll also bring a few very fresh figures from the market for that.

So, yeah, join me again for that and follow, follow, like subscribe to the podcast and make me very happy with that.

So thanks for today.

Goodbye.

You listened to let's Talk Marketplace, the Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lommer and Vanari Dichte.

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