How DVD seller Glacier Bay manages unexpected success at eBay

Glacier Bay Entertainment, an online retailer of hard-to-find and specialty DVDs, found online success on eBay to be almost more than it could initially handle. Within nine months of its launch in May 2002, sales were approaching $500,000, thanks in part to industry connections president Randy Smythe, a former TV and movie producer, was able to leverage to obtain a broad collection of titles. With only three full-time employees and a few part-time employees to list, sell and process thousands of auctions and buy-it-now sales on eBay every week, the Anaheim, CA-based shop turned to auction management services provider ChannelAdvisor Corp. to automate its system.

Though he’d used ChannelAdvisor Pro software to test his business model initially, Smythe`s Glacier Bay business quickly mushroomed. Glacier Bay was listing 2,000 titles in each of the two three-day auction cycles it runs each week soon after it launched last May, but by fall, sales had more than doubled that amount, hitting 6,000 per cycle over the holidays.

To handle the growth Glacier Bay added ChannelAdvisor Merchant, a self-service version of the software ChannelAdvisor uses to serve enterprise–scaled organizations such as Sears and Motorola. The self-service auction management software, designed for businesses selling more than $20,000 per month on eBay and in other online marketplaces, supports functions including inventory control, integrated payement processing and performance reporting. A recently released new version of the software adds enhanced functionality, such as automatically re-listing the approximate 50% of listings that don’t close during their initial listing period.

Glacier Bay expects to be posting more than 10,000 titles on eBay every three days by the end of the year, and will open a separate web site to handle slower–moving titles. “ChannelAdvisor Merchant lets me do a lot of things I could never do before,” says Smythe.