Mission to Sell - Project Three Proposal Revised (story type)
To: Mr. Kevin McKelvey
From: Myles Basso, Tim Okerson, Amanda Sands, Reid Gray, Craig Barker
Date: April 11, 2008
Subject: eBay sales for Trinity Mission Outlet Store
Proposal
‘Mission to Sell’ is a group that includes Timothy Gray, Amanda Sands, Craig Barker, Myles Basso, and Tim Okerson. We propose to enable the Trinity Mission Outlet Store to sell more of their merchandise by helping them use the eBay, an online auction site, to create an eBay store. This store will allow them to manage and sell products to people outside of the local community.
Client
Our client, The Trinity Mission Outlet Store, is a nonprofit store that sells gently used donated goods at a low price in Lafayette, Indiana. The money gained from the sale of these items is used for the upkeep of the store and also is used for the many programs that Trinity Mission offers in the community, such as; homeless shelters and meals for the homeless. It operates in a similar way to Goodwill Industries International, the world’s largest nonprofit provider, but on a smaller scale. Because of the many donations that Trinity Mission Outlet store receives, they often have a large amount of merchandise in the back of the store that they are not able to get onto the floor of the store quickly enough. Our proposal to help Trinity Mission Outlet Store use eBay to sell their merchandise will allow them to have a greater turnover of products, as well as sell to a larger amount of people. This proposal is mostly geared toward overstock items or items that are not selling on the floor, and may not want to be used for items on the floor due to negative feedback on eBay and the community of Lafayette if there happens to be a confusion.
eBay Business
We would like to show Trinity Mission Outlet Store how to use eBay to create a store, in which they can list, manage and sell the items they have in the store. The eBay store will allow Trinity Mission Outlet Store to organize their products online as well as provide pictures of what they are helping to sell. An eBay store offers powerful marketing features, easy listing management, advanced reporting, and selling tools. When opening an eBay store users are able to access a dedicated toll-free customer support that can come in handy for beginning users. New eBay businesses offer one-to-one consulting to help get you on the right foot.
A PayPal account will also be setup to allow fast, easy, and secure way to receive payments through eBay. This will attract more buyers, allows instant payments, and cancel the stresses of buying and selling on the internet. We believe that we will be able to help Trinity Mission Outlet Store use eBay easily, and that it will greatly benefit their store.
Costs and Shipping Issues
The advantage of eBay is that customers can bid on the item until the auction is final, unlike in a store where they will only pay a base price. Some issues that need to be addressed about these auctions include shipping costs, auction costs, and a final value fee. The first fee that is included in posting an auction is the insertion fee. The insertion fee is a value based on the amount your item is selling for. The Insertion fees are as follows; $1-$10 is 25 cents, $10-$25 is 35 cents, $25-$200 is 2 dollars, and $200 and more is 3 dollars. The next fee included when posting an auction is the final value fee. This fee is a percentage of the closing value. An auction sold for $25 and under is an 8.75% fee, an auction $1000 and under is the 8.75% of the initial $25 plus a 3.5% of the amount after $25 to $1000, and any auction above $1000 has the same percentages plus a 1.5% fee after $1000. As for shipping, our group proposes that the shipping be handled by Trinity Mission Outlet. Shipping labels can be printed online, but being so close to the post office we do not see the need for this service. A service that we will provide to you is a shipping calculator on each of you auctions. This is so you can accurately predict the price of shipping and will not waste profits on shipping materials and costs.
Presentation
Our group proposes to develop the multimedia presentation using PowerPoint or Adobe Connect. Microsoft’s PowerPoint is the most common presentation developer and will most likely be the easiest to present the material to Trinity Mission Outlet. The second method of presenting the material is Adobe’s Connect. This software allows for online meetings and the ability for screen capture in video format instead of just presenting screenshots with arrows references main points. We will use one of these to show Trinity Mission Outlet Store how to use eBay to their advantage.
In this project we will divide the work evenly between the five members. Categories such as presenting the benefits of online selling, creating templates for online auctions, and eBay business tools can be evenly distributed among the group members. We will each contribute in a timely manner, and provide input to each draft.
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I really like your groups
I really like your groups proposal, being an ebay nut my self. It is good when you can ttake you skills and help a worhty cause. Is it possible for their group to get reduced fees because they are not for profit? also what system is going to be used to keep shipments organized
Ebay
I think your group has a great idea for trinity mission. Your proposal looks solid. It seems you have thought most things through and researched what it will take for an organization like theirs to use this. One thing, I do know that they operate using a lot of volunteer time. It may be difficult to address the fact that they would need volunteers to take digital pictures and post every auction online. It seems this would be a very daunting task since a large portion of their sales comes from clothing. Maybe limiting to larger or specialty items would work best. Also, like the previous comment, it might be worth looking into to see if they can get a discount being a nonprofit organization.
My comments are on the
My comments are on the attached document.Overall your team have written and excellent proposal.
Peer Review Comment
I think you guys have a great proposal for a great cause, and my favorite part was that you took an issue of concern and confronted it right in the proposal. It shows the amount of effort you are putting into creating a successful presentation. I do however agree with an earlier comment that the section regarding the shipping and costs could be broken down into an easier to read format. It's a lot of important information, and I think it might be easier to digest in a bulleted or list format.
Proposal Comment
Your group has a great idea to help the mission. When I read through the proposal it looks like you have covered all the basis fot Ebay. It seems like your group did some extensive research to make sure that the organization could use Ebay. I know that the organization sells alot of clothes so there is going to be a huge listng on Ebay. I dont know how your group could adress this. Maybe only listing items of greater value.
Proposal Comment 2
This project is not only an excellent application of eBay but will benefit the community as well. I know many people that have turned their standard brick and mortar store fronts into a booming business by tapping into the power of eBay auctions. Once again, I echo the other comments in noting you could present costs in some sort of tabular form rather than paragraph as this would be easier to read and digest for the reader. Other than that, solid work, and a great proposal.
Proposal Comment
I really like your idea of using eBay to help sell the donated items to create a wider market in hopes to increase profits. I was not aware of how much the fees were. I also have the question of whether or not eBay gives non-profits a break on fees. If they sell a lot of clothes, maybe bundling clothes together by size can work to help sell children’s clothes. I know that low income families with growing children just want to be able to get clothes that fit their children and would support bundles. Taking pictures and uploading them to the eBay site will not take much longer than moving items to the floor and pricing them so I do not think that placing items on auction will add an excessive amount of work.
Proposal Response
Your proposal is very effective in the high level of information that it contains. Your group maneuvers through that information with effective details and description that engages and persuades your reader. Another strength of the proposal is that you anticipate problems and explain them here, which informs later drafting and testing that you'll do.
I think the writing style is strong, overall. Good work with sentences and verbs to produce an engaging document. Headings are effective, but can be more descriptive. I think one thing that will improve readability is shorter paragraphs, especially in the second and fourth sections.
Please email if you have any questions.