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2112t (22500)  
Specialty Record Store Finds Loyal Clientele
"It was one of my favorite albums years ago," says Tim Shelton of the Rush record that inspired the user ID behind Shelton Music Collectibles. "I've always been a collector. I started out selling vinyl. For years, I was advertising in print magazines like Goldmine. Around 1997, a friend of mine had just signed up on eBay and told me how successful he was in selling things. My wife and I decided in early 1998 that we were going to make the transition from print to the Internet."
"eBay was more obscure back then. We signed up, and I continued to sell records. In the first couple of years, we dabbled in movies, posters and sports cards, too. Eventually we got hooked into CDs and did away with the vinyl. CDs are more plentiful on the secondary market. Now we specialize in collectible CDs--samplers, out-of-print titles, imports and things like that. We found our niche. We had three CDs in the last month that sold for $800 each!"
"Right now, it's my wife and I running every aspect of the business from purchasing to packing and shipping. We're almost victims of our own success. We've toyed with the idea of bringing people on, and we do hire part time help for the holiday season. We're hoping to increase sales by 40% over last year," says Tim.
Only on eBay!
"We've had an eBay Store for 4 years," says Tim, "almost since they invented the idea. They made a change around April (2004) so that Store Inventory listings come up in main search results. When they did that, we saw a huge increase in sales. We sell a lot more stuff thanks to that--we can move more of the obscure items."
As a seller of rare CDs, the Store Inventory format is particularly useful to Tim. When an eBay search turns up fewer than ten Buy It Now and auction-style listings, Store Inventory listings also appear on the search results page in their own section.
"We use a third party service to list 3000-5000 items per month. We currently run all items initially as a 7-day, auction-style listing. If an item doesn't sell, we always move it into the Store. Most of our stuff is low margin, so the low Inventory fees help, and we don't use a lot of listing enhancements."
Best Practices
Tim gets a lot of mileage out of his eBay Store. He's added custom pages to spell out his Store policies and to answer FAQ. On top of that, he uses eBay Traffic Reporting, which comes with all eBay Stores and with additional functionality at the Featured and Anchor Store levels. "It's really interesting to be able to go in and see how people are finding you--where they are coming from and what search parameters they use. That's information you can use."
"Another thing we do is to provide fast, friendly and personalized service to all our customers, whether we're answering questions or following up on when things shipped. We try to answer e-mails within 24 hours and we're at about 99.8% positive with more than 30,000 total feedback comments left. To maintain that high a percentage for a long time is not easy." | 
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