Five Twitteriffic Tools For Online Sellers

You’d have had to be living in a cave, with dark sunglasses on and earplugs in your ears for the past 3 years not to have the word twitter at some stage.

But that doesn’t mean everybody knows what it is…

One thing that many people who use twitter know is that there are gold up in them thar hills and the twitterverse is crammed with success stories from big chains like Dell (venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-has-made-dell-1-million-in-revenue/) to local businesses like Naked Pizza (marketingpilgrim.com/2009/05/twitter-local-business-and-results.html).

This has resulted in various retail, eBay alternative sites and ecommerce vendors getting in on the act including us here at Chinavasion.

As a result, a bunch of tools have cropped up to make it easier for ecommerce users and eBay resellers to take advantage of this micro blogging site:

This isn’t so much of a twitter-specific tool as it is a web 2.0 tool to help you keep track of your, and your customers’ packages.

All you need to do is to type the details of the shipment into the site and then it will send you updates on where your package is, without forcing you to continuously check the courier’s website.

So far the service will send alerts to the following locations:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Email
• By SMS
• By RSS

It’s free to use and ideal for eBay resellers who want to keep their customers up to date on the location of their package. Or stay in touch themselves so they can help customers out faster with shipping problems.

You can get it here (usetrackthis.com/).

Are you worried about what’s being said about you on twitter? Why don’t you follow what is being said.

While it is possible to use Twitter’s search function (search.twitter.com/) and RSS feeds another way to keep track is through monittter.

You are able to track any number of multiple keywords/names you like on the multiple thread interface. This means you could potentially keep up with what people are saying about you and your competitors at the same time.

Get it here (monitter.com/).

Of course you’re going to want to monitor how many sales and re-directs you are getting from Twitter.

Access to site analytic s is not usually a problem if you are tracking sales to your own site… You can follow these through Google Analytics.

However, if you are tracking traffic to listings on eBay or one of the many eBay alternatives which have cropped up lately.

Hootsuite offers a solution to this and, provided you shorten your URLs with their Ow.ly (ow.ly/url/shorten-url) service, then they will be able to tell you exactly how many people are clicking on your tiny URLS.

Get it here (hootsuite.com/).

If there’s anything anybody loves it’s a deal. The rise in popularity of coupon sites are a great example of this and there are several twitter coupon sites which will put your coupons right there on Twitter where people are most likely to feel the need to make an impulse buy.

Twtqpon is a free application from a group of programmers who have released a whole series of twitter-specific applications.

Sites like killer startups (killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/twtqpon-com-offer-deals-through-twitter) think it’s a good idea and say that things are done pretty seamlessly

get it here (twtqpon.com/).

Cheap tweet is not so much of a coupon creation system as a Digg-like site that measures the popularity of deals by the number of people who have retweeted it and whether the sites users think it’s a deal or not.

Not so much of a tool as something to keep an eye on, even have a guide (cheaptweet.com/info/guidelines) to tell you how you can get listed.

See it here (cheaptweet.com/).

If you aren’t already on twitter get tweeting. Even if you just start tweeting your specials you will be increasing your exposure on one of the hottest sites on the internet.

If you’ve used any of this service let us know what they are like in the poll below and tell us if there is any Twitter application which you think is particularly valuable for resellers.