10 Great Ways to Source Low Cost Products for eBay.
So you’re having trouble finding stock cheaply enough to sell it for a good profit? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Garage sales. The chances are you’ve gone most of your life seeing ads for these and ignoring them. Start going to as many as you can. You won’t find good things at every one, but when you find one person with good stuff, make them an offer for the lot – they’ll be so happy about it that you can get a real bargain.
Markets. If your area has a market, then go there and look around for anything good. You could buy it there if it’s cheap enough, or try to make friends with the market traders and find out who their suppliers are.
Pawn shops. Pawn shops don’t usually know what to do with the junk they accumulate (unless it’s jewellery, of course). Generally, they put their stock out on the shelves haphazardly, hoping that someday someone with a little money will just happen to come in, search around and buy wildly obscure things. Get them to offer you a discount for bulk.
Real auctions. Go to a real auction, as the chances are that you can resell things for more than they will sell them. After all, they only have a few hundred people in that room – you have a few million to sell to!
Local newspapers. Place an ad in the local paper that reads “I pay cash for [your item type]”, with your phone number. If you can afford it, make it a big display ad, so it’ll be noticed.
Ad boards. Get one of those little ads in the grocery store.
Friends. Ask your friends if they have anything they’d like to sell you, and ask them to spread the word to their friends.
Become known. Give out business cards, mention to people what you do. The chances are that you’ll come across someone who’ll say “Oh, really? I’ve got a load of [item] I don’t want”.
Shops. This might be a little surprising, but some real shops even sell things more cheaply than they sell on eBay. Take a look around your local deep discounter, and pay special attention to any shop that takes trade-ins from customers. The chances are they take a loss on trade-ins as a promotion, and are dying to get rid of that stock.
And finally: eBay! When you’re looking at the completed items view, you’ll notice the massive range of prices that items can sell for on eBay. Try taking the highest-priced item and searching for it on its own, then sort by lowest price first: I can almost guarantee that you’ll see an auction for the same item where it sold for almost nothing. The trick is to find these flawed auctions before they close, win them using a bid sniping service, and then turn around and resell the item.
After all that trouble, though, when do sell the item you might find that a buyer leaves you a feedback rating you just don’t think is fair. The next email will show you what to do about it.
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10 Steps to Successful Selling on eBay.
So you want to be a successful seller with your own eBay business, do you? Here’s a simple, ten-step path to eBay enlightenment.
Step 1: Identify your market. Take a while to sit and watch for what sells and what doesn’t out of the items you’re interested in. Any market research data you can collect will be very useful to you later on. You’ll probably see the ‘sweet spots’ quite quickly – those one or two items that always seem to sell for a good price.
Step 2: Watch the competition. Before you invest any money, see what the other sellers in your category are up to, and what their strategies are. Pay special attention to any flaws their auctions might have, because this is where you can move in and beat them at their own game.
Step 3: Find a product: Get hold of a supplier for whatever it is you want to sell, and see what the best rates you can get are – don’t be afraid to ring round quite a few to get the best deal. If the eBay prices you’ve seen are higher than the supplier’s, then you’re set.
Step 4: Start small: Don’t throw thousands at your idea straight away – get started slowly, see what works and what doesn’t, and learn as you go. Remember that it’s very cheap to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and who knows, they might just work!
Step 5: Test and repeat. Keep trying different strategies until you find something that works, and then don’t be ashamed to keep doing it, again and again. The chances are that you’ve just found a good niche.
Step 6: Work out a business plan: A business plan doesn’t need to be anything formal, just a few pages that outline the market opportunity you’ve spotted, your strategy, strengths and weaknesses of the plan and a brief budget. This is more for you than it is for anyone else.
Step 7: Invest and expand: This is the time to throw money at the problem. Buy inventory, and start spending more time on your business. Set a goal number of sales each week, increasing it each time.
Step 8: Make it official: Once you’ve made a few thousand dollars worth of sales, you should really register yourself as a business. Don’t worry, it’s not expensive or hard to do – a lawyer is the best person to help you through the process.
Step 9: Automate: You’ll probably find that you’re writing the same things again and again in emails or item descriptions. This is the time to give up on the manual method and turn to automated software that can create listings for you, and respond to completed auctions and payments with whatever message you provide.
Step 10: Never give up: Even when it looks like it’s all going wrong, don’t stop trying until you succeed. If you keep working at it then you’ll almost always find that you make a real breakthrough just when things are starting to look desperate.
Once you get into the swing of things, you might start thinking that you should quit your job and take up eBay selling part time. But it’s not always as easy as that – there are all sorts of factors that you need to consider. The next email will weigh up the case for and against taking up eBay full-time.
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10 Sure-fire Ways to Kill Your eBay Business.
It’s surprisingly easy to kill your eBay business, if you’re not careful – sure, you can start over from scratch without it costing you anything, but do you really want to? Still, if you want your business to end up dead in the water, here are some simple ways to do it.
Lie about an item: Say it works fine when it sometimes doesn’t work. Say it’s in perfect condition when it has a scratch. Your customers will hate you!
Post whenever you feel like it: Make sure to leave your customers hanging around, wondering when their item is going to turn up. This makes sure they buy from someone else next time.
Let items end anytime: Few people will be around to care about your auction if it ends in the middle of the night. Why go to the trouble of working out whether auctions will end at a good time?
Don’t bother with email: Customers are just timewasters anyway. eBay businesses are supposed to run themselves! Never give informed responses to questions about your item.
Sell rubbish: Really, it’s just eBay. You can just sell any old tat from the market for a 200% profit. Let quality be someone else’s concern – I mean, really, what do they expect for that price?
Refuse to give discounts: You know what your items cost, you know what your profit margin is going to be, and you’re not going to negotiate. Remember that giving customers special deals might make them feel good and come back to you again.
Make your listings ugly: As many colours, flashing lights and animations as possible will really give those customers a headache. Write as much in CAPITALS!!!! as you can. Preferably big, red capitals. Be sure to use the fonts Impact and Comic Sans. For an extra special touch, see if you can figure out a way to add some music.
Don’t take photos: It’s such trouble, after all. If buyers are picky enough to actually want to see items before they bid on them, then screw ‘em, that’s what I say.
Write short descriptions: Be as brief as possible, and use lots of mysterious abbreviations. This obviously makes you look very cool. You can even just write the title again in the description box. Think of the effort you’ll save!
Use reserve auctions: Now, this is a fairly controversial final choice, but it really is one of the best ways to scare away your customers. They’ll see ‘reserve not yet met’, and click that ‘back’ button before you know it. Luckily, they can always bid in a normal auction for the item somewhere else.
Now that you know the ten ways to kill your eBay business, how about we explore what to do if you want to do the opposite, and make a success of it? The next email will give you ten steps to successful selling on eBay.
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10 Tips for Being a Better Seller.
If you’ve got this far, you’ve got the basics of eBay. There are a few things left, though, that you might not have thought of trying. Quite a few of these tips go against the advice many give for eBay selling – some are a little risky and some are just odd. They’re all worth a try, though, and I’m sure you’ll find at least some you want to keep using.
1. Keep more records. It might sound time consuming, but you’ll actually find it easier in the long run – less time spent trying to figure out which item that cheque you got this morning is for.
2. Post without payment. Don’t even wait for payment to clear! That might sound risky, but it’ll mean that the buyers get their items more quickly – for small items, you might find it worth the occasional loss to give such quick service.
3. Post every day. Once you start shifting a high volume of items, go and post them every day – again, they’ll get there more quickly, making your customers very happy. The best way to do this is if you have items small enough to drop in a postbox.
4. Encourage an auction mentality. Don’t have a Buy it Now price, and make it very clear when it’s the last or only stock you’ll be getting in. Always refer to winning bidders as ‘winners’.
5. Mention every defect your item has. Now why would you do that, you might ask? The answer is that it builds credibility: the small hit you take from the slight flaws is nothing compared to the big boost in trust you get for admitting it. People bid more when they trust the seller.
6. Say how you got the item. Don’t be afraid to go off on a tangent and give all sorts of fun details of how you got hold of what you’re selling – it gives your auction character and, again, builds trust.
7. Accept odd payment methods. Sooner or later you’re going to get a buyer who wants to pay by sending cash in an envelope, or something equally unusual. Why not let them? Be flexible.
8. Don’t be afraid to sell low. Let the occasional item go for a really low price to a good buyer. You might only just break even on the item, but the person who got that bargain will be back again and again.
9. Give free shipping for a certain number of orders, or orders over a certain amount. People might buy something else they don’t want as much, just to get the free shipping. (Amazon use this strategy to great effect).
10. Ship worldwide. Take the time to investigate the prices, and be nice to international customers – imagine how much you’re expanding your market. That’s not to mention the effect of people bidding highly for items that are rare in their country.
Another way to make it easier is to be a better seller is to use some of the many third party eBay tools that are available. The next email will take a look at a selection of tools you might find useful.
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10 Tips for Increasing Your eBay Response.
So you’ve got the buyer in front of your auction, and they’ve read the description. They’re must be interested, or they wouldn’t be looking… but just how can you push them over that line and make them leave a bid? Read on for some tips.
Improve your picture: In all that description writing, you might have missed the vital importance of your item’s picture. A picture with bad lighting or an intrusive background looks amateurish and won’t make anyone want to buy from you.
Add an About Me page: You’ll be surprised how much you can reassure bidders just by creating an About Me page and putting a little bit about yourself on your business on there. You can also have a few special offers there for people who bother to look at the page, and let people subscribe to your mailing list so that you can email them updates.
Use SquareTrade: Signing up at SquareTrade and displaying their logo on your auctions shows that you are committed to have them resolve any disputes that arise. You always see this on PowerSellers auctions – it makes you look more professional.
Write terms and conditions: Have the ‘small print’ clearly visible on all your auctions, giving details of things like shipping times and prices, your refund policy, and any other business practices you might have. This helps build confidence with buyers.
Show off your feedback: Copy and paste a selection of the feedback comments you’re most proud of to each item’s description page, instead of making bidders go and look for it. If you have 100% positive feedback, be sure to write that on every auction too.
Add NR to your titles: If you have extra space in a title, put ‘NR’ (no reserve) on the end. Bidders prefer auctions that don’t have a reserve price, and doing this lets them see that yours don’t.
Benefits not features: Make sure your description focuses on the benefits that your item can give to the customer, not just its features. This is a classic sales technique. If you have trouble with this, remember: ‘cheap’ is a feature, ‘save money’ is a benefit.
List more items: If you want more people to respond to your items, then list more items! You might find you have better like listing items at the same time, instead of one-by-one. There’s no need to use a Dutch auction – you can just keep two or three auctions going at once for an item you have more than one of in stock.
Accept unusual payment methods: To reach those last few buyers, accept payment methods that many sellers don’t, like cheques.
Buy some upgrades: The best upgrade is the most expensive one, which makes your item appear first in search results. In crowded categories, you might find that this is worth the money.
Once you’ve got some buyers, you want to keep them coming back to you. The next email will show you how to turn one-time buyers into long-term customers.
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5 Simple Steps to Posting Your First eBay Auction.
It’s surprisingly simple to get started posting your very first auction on eBay. Here’s what you need to do.
Step 1: Open an eBay seller’s account.
If you’ve bought things on eBay, then you already have an account – just log in with it and click ‘Sell’ in the toolbar at the top of the page, then click ‘Create a seller’s account’. If you’ve never used eBay before, then you’ll need to open an account first using the ‘register’ link underneath the toolbar, and then click ‘Sell’ and ‘Create a seller’s account’. The eBay site will then guide you through the process. For security, this may involve giving card details and bank information.
Step 2: Decide what to sell.
For your first little experiment with eBay, it doesn’t really matter what you sell. Take a look around the room you’re in – I’m sure there’s something in there that you’re not all that attached to and could put in the post. Small books and CDs are ideal first items.
Step 3: Submit your item.
Click ‘Sell’, and you’re on your way to listing your item.
The first thing you need to do is choose a category – it’s best to just type in what the item is and let eBay choose for you. Next, write a title and description. Include key words you think people will search for in the title box, and all the information you have about the item in the description box.
Now set a starting price. $0.01 is the best starting price, as it draws people in to bid who otherwise wouldn’t, and items will almost never finish at such a low price. The next thing to set is the duration of the auction: 3, 5, 7 or 10 days. This is up to you: longer sales will usually get more bids, but will also seem to drag on forever. If you’ve taken a picture, add it now – items with pictures always sell for more. Finally, tick the payment methods you will accept (just PayPal is best for now), and where you will post to (limit yourself to your own country to begin with). Submit and you’re done!
Step 4: Wait for it to sell.
This is just a matter of sitting back and letting eBay do its thing – buyers will find your item and leave bids on it. Some bidders might email you with questions about the item, and you should do your best to answer these questions as quickly as you can.
Remember that if your item doesn’t sell then you can list it again for free.
Step 5: Collect payment and post it.
eBay will sent your buyer emails guiding them through the process of sending you payment for the item. Make sure you have the money before you send anything.
Once you’ve got the payment, all you need to do is pack the item for posting (make sure to use some bubble wrap), take the buyer’s address from the confirmation email eBay sent you, and write it on the parcel. Put some stamps on, post it, and you’re done!
I hope you enjoyed selling your first item. Now that you’re starting to get into it, the next email will give you a checklist of things you need to do to be a successful seller.
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A Beginner’s Guide to the Different eBay Auction Types.
Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.
For every seller who doesn’t like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there’s another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly. eBay tries to cater to all tastes. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and their advantages for you.
Normal Auctions.
These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the auctions everyone knows: buyers bid, others outbid them, they bid again, and the winner gets the item. Simple.
Reserve Auctions.
Reserve auctions are for sellers who don’t want their items to sell for less than a certain price – a concept you’ll know about if you’re familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that the buyer will be told if their bid does not meet the reserve price you set, and they’ll need to bid again if they want the item. If no-one is willing to meet your price, then the auction is cancelled, and you keep the item.
Fixed Price (‘Buy it Now’) Auctions.
Buy it Now auctions can work in one of two ways. You can add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that buyers can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. This lets you avoid all the complications of the auction format and simply list your items for how much you want them to sell for.
Recently, eBay added a twist to fixed price auctions: the ‘best offer’. This means that buyers can contact you to negotiate a price, which could be a good way to get sell some extra stock at a small discount. The only downside to reserve and fixed price auctions is that you pay a small extra fee to use these formats. In general, it is more worth using reserve auctions for higher-priced items and fixed price auctions for lower-priced ones – but remember that you can combine the two formats.
Multiple Item (‘Dutch’) Auctions.
These are auctions where you can sell more than one of a certain item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don’t worry – everyone else does too! These auctions are very rare.
What is more common is when a seller has a lot of one item, and lists it using a combination of two auction types: a multiple-item fixed price auction. This just means that you can just say how many of the item you they have, and offer them at a fixed price per unit. Buyers can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them.
Now that you know about the different types of auctions, you should make sure that the items you plan to sell don’t violate eBay’s listing policies. The next email will let you know what’s allowed and what is a big no-no.
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A Look at Third Party eBay Tools.
There are plenty of companies out there offering third party eBay tools. Most of them are web-based instead of downloadable, so you pay a monthly fee instead of just buying the software. But do you know what these sites can do for you? It can be hard to get to grips with what’s out there using a search engine, so here’s a quick rundown of the key players.
Andale (www.andale.com).
Andale offer lots of small products instead of one solution that does everything: you can take your pick from a lister, image hosting, counters, analysers, a gallery, a checkout and an email manager. The price plans are a bit of a maze, but quite reasonable as long as you don’t go and use everything.
Andale’s real claim to fame is that they’ve been doing it for so long – they’re not some fly-by-night organisation, and many eBay sellers have been using their free counters for absolutely years. They also have a reputation for being very responsive to customers, and will often talk to you directly on their forums and implement any suggestions you might have for improving their software.
Vendio (www.vendio.com).
Vendio offer two editions of their software, Sales Manager: a Merchandising edition and an Inventory edition. The difference between the two is that the Merchandising edition is designed to make it easier to list individual auctions, while the Inventory edition is for sellers who sell many of the same item. They offer a pay-as-you go price of 10c per auction.
They also offer software called Tickets Manager, special software for people who sell lots of tickets on eBay – an odd product to have, but useful if you happen to sell tickets. Other services offered by Vendio include web and image hosting, fancy Flash galleries of your products for your listings, and stores.
ChannelAdvisor (www.channeladvisor.com).
ChannelAdvisor offer their software in three versions: Enterprise, Merchant and Pro. Enterprise and Merchant are both designed for very big businesses, though, and the chances are that the Pro version does everything you’d want. ChannelAdvisor is popular among sellers who want a solution that they know is used and trusted on a very large scale by enterprise-level customers.
It offers all the standard bulk listing and inventory features, as well as the unique feature of being able to create auctions from an Excel spreadsheet of your inventory. The cost is high, though, at $29.95 per month.
And Many, Many More…
eBay maintain a comprehensive directory of third-party software, which you can browse through anytime you have a few days to kill. You can look either for complete solutions or for each part of what you want individually – the choice is so daunting that there’s bound to be something out there for you. You can look at their directory at http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SolutionsDirectory.
Once your items have sold and you’re about to ship them, you might be a little nervous about whether you can trust your buyer. Our next email will give you a few tips for spotting problem buyers before you send them anything.
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An eBay Seller’s Checklist.
Being a seller is a lot of responsibility, and sometimes you might feel like you’re not doing everything you should be. This simple checklist will help you keep on top of things.
Have you found out everything you possibly could about your items? Try typing their names into a search engine – you might find out something you didn’t know. If someone else is selling the same thing as you, then always try to provide more information about it than they do.
Do you monitor the competition? Always keep an eye on how much other items the same as or similar to yours are selling, and what prices they’re being offered at. There’s usually little point in starting a fixed price auction for $100 when someone else is selling the item for $90.
Have you got pictures of the items? It’s worth taking the time to photograph your items, especially if you have a digital camera. If you get serious about eBay but don’t have a camera, then you will probably want to invest in one at some point.
Are you emailing your sellers? It’s worth sending a brief email when transactions go through: something like a simple “Thank you for buying my item, please let me know when you have sent the payment”. Follow this up with “Thanks for your payment, I have posted your [item name] today”. You will be surprised how many problems you will avoid just by communicating this way.
Also, are you checking your emails? Remember that potential buyers can send you email about anything at any time, and not answering these emails will just make them go somewhere else instead of buying from you.
Do your item description pages have everything that buyers need to know? If you’re planning to offer international delivery, then it’s good to make a list of the charges to different counties and display it on each auction. If you have any special terms and conditions (for example, if you will give a refund on any item as long as it hasn’t been opened), then you should make sure these are displayed too.
Have you been wrapping your items correctly? Your wrapping should be professional for the best impression: use appropriately sized envelopes or parcels, wrap the item in bubble wrap to stop it from getting damaged, and print labels instead of hand-writing addresses. Oh, and always use first class post – don’t be cheap.
Do you follow up? It is worth sending out an email a few days after you post an item, saying “Is everything alright with your purchase? I hope you received it and it was as you expected.” This might sound like giving the customer an opportunity to complain, but you should be trying to help your customers, not take their money and run.
Being a really good eBay seller, more than anything else, is about providing genuinely good and honest customer service. That’s the only foolproof way to protect your reputation. Of course, you might be wondering by now whether it’s really worth all the hassle to get a good reputation on eBay. Won’t people buy from you anyway, and couldn’t you just open a new account if it really comes down to that? Our next email will set you straight.
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Are There Any eBay “Secrets” That Are Worth Buying?
If you look around a little on the web, you’ll no doubt come across people trying to sell you ebooks about eBay’s ‘secrets’ for as much as $20. Here’s a sample:
“Along with 400,000 other excited eBay fanatics I now make a living using the Internet and eBay. I can go days without ever speaking to a single customer, but I have a world wide customer base. My online business runs like a well oiled machine with a part-time effort!”
You too can get such valuable tips as:
“All you need to do is write a list of questions other people would pay to get the answers to, give that list to a friend, have the friend call you on the phone and ask you those questions, record the call, have the recording transcribed, and edit the transcription! Presto - you've just created a ‘meaty’ ebook fast!”
So What Do These Books Contain?
Don’t be deceived by the slick sales copy and promises of ‘automatic sales machines’ and unique sales strategies. Most of these ‘winning money-making strategies’ boil down to the same thing. Follow their advice, and you’ll be writing long, old-fashioned sales copy in an effort to sell shoddily-written downloadable ebooks to gullible souls, either directly through eBay or by trying to redirect people through your About Me page to your website.
The theory is that the rubbish ebooks will sell themselves, and you won’t have to do a thing.
Here’s a question to ask yourself: if these ‘secrets’ work so well, then why aren’t the ebooks authors spending every hour they have putting them into practice, instead of trying to sell you ebooks? If these secrets were so valuable, then why would they give them away for that price, or any price? Out of charity? Yeah, right.
Here’s the reality: trying to sell ebooks on eBay or anywhere else is very likely to get you nowhere, and fast. The bottom fell out of the ebook market a long time ago – in fact, it’s doubtful whether it ever had a bottom to begin with. The ebooks are an effort to get to you sign up for all sorts of services, making money for the ebooks’ writers each time. In short, the only way to profit from ‘secrets of eBay’ ebooks is to be selling them, not buying them – and do you really want to become a con artist?
If you’d like to take a look at one of these ebooks, try searching for the name and picking through results. The chances are you’ll find an excerpt or review – and if it’s not by someone trying to sell you the ebook then it won’t be a favourable view. The fact that most ebooks you buy for $20 come with unlimited resale rights should tip you off if nothing else does.
It’s All Out There for Free.
You can almost any information that someone might be trying to sell you in an ebook for free using a search engine, if you take the time. Ebooks aren’t worth the paper they’re not printed on.
If you’d like a real way to make more money, look out for our next email: we’ll show you how and when to use eBay’s powerful ‘Second Chance Offer’ feature.
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Creating eBay Selling Opportunities by Communicating with Your Buyer.
One thing many eBay sellers neglect is to actually communicate with their buyers – not with some automated ‘suggestion’ system, but with actual person-to-person contact. If you can be friendly and sound nice, then you can make them think you’re doing them a favour while you make a few extra sales.
‘I Could Throw In…’
When you receive an order for an item that costs a lot for shipping and needs some kind of equipment, this is an ideal opportunity to make a ‘friendly’ extra sale. For example, if someone has just bought a computer, you could send an email like this:
“I’m just emailing you to ask if you’d like a mouse or a keyboard – since you’re buying a computer from me, I can throw in any accessories you want without charging any extra shipping. If you’re not interested though, then don’t worry about it – it was just a thought.”
Note how informal this email has to be. It can’t stink of sales, or the whole ‘communication’ thing will be ruined. Would you rather buy something extra from someone who says “you might as well, since you’re paying shipping anyway” or from someone who says something like “our valued customers will also love our GREAT DEALS on mice – check it out!” I know what my answer is.
Know Anyone Else?
Here’s a simple thing to try: when you thank your buyer, simply say that if they’re pleased with you then you’d really appreciate it if they could spread the word. Many eBay buyers feel like they’ve got a real bargain, and combining this with good customer service could be enough to make your customer go out and start writing down your eBay store’s address on pieces of paper for their friends. If you notice a lot of orders coming from the same town, then you’ll know that this technique is working.
Any Problems?
If you contact the buyer a few months down the line to ask if their product is still working fine, you might find that they’re having a problem you can fix, by sending a spare part or an upgrade. This is another opportunity to make a sale – not to mention helpful for them.
Anything to Sell?
If you’ve just sold them a brand new item, ask your buyer if they have an old one that they might like to trade in. They will often be delighted to take you up on your offer, since they were wondering how they were going to get rid of their old one anyway. Give them a fair price for it and offer to pay their postage and you won’t believe how happy they’ll be – and the chances are you can make a good profit on what they send you.
When everything is going to plan with your buyers, it’s nice to be able to spend a while every week leaving them all big chunks of positive feedback. But how do you make this feedback the best it can be? We’ll take a look at the dos and don’ts of leaving feedback for buyers in the next email.
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Design Tips for eBay Templates.
Templates are the design elements that you might have noticed some sellers using on their auctions, like the borders around the edge, and the different fonts. Many sellers who are new to eBay don’t bother using them, and you might not have either – generally, a descriptive listing and a good picture will do the job just fine.
If you want to really finish your auctions off and make a really good impression on your buyers though, it’s useful to have a good template. Here are a few tips on what to do and what not to do.
Choose something appropriate. The most important part of your template is what you choose in eBay’s listing designer (in step 3 of the Sell Your Item process), or the equivalent in whatever listing software you’re now using. You might prefer to use third-party software for this, as eBay’s designs can be somewhat… unimpressive.
Anyway, the different template designs will usually be themed, with names like ‘Computers’, ‘Toys’ or ‘Crafts’. Make sure what you choose is appropriate for what you’re selling – those flowers might be very pretty, but what exactly do they have to do with DVDs?
Put the photo at the top. The photo of your item is far more important than the text. Put your best photo at the top of the description, followed by the text, and then finally any extra pictures you have. The full-size photo of the item is the first thing your buyers want to see when they click your auction – why leave it for last?
Add your logo. A well-designed logo gives a professional air to your auctions, especially if the colour scheme and look fits in with the rest of the template, and it also serves to create more recognition when people have seen your auctions before. Pay a logo designer a few dollars to do you a logo if you don’t have one already.
Don’t be afraid of large fonts. Fonts are supposed to be different sizes sometimes. When you have something important to say, don’t be afraid to put it in a bigger font, headline-style… just as long as you don’t get carried away, of course.
Learn a little HTML. It might sound scary, but there are plenty of books out there about learning HTML, and a little goes a long way. Once you know what you’re doing, you’ll find all sorts of ways to make your auction look better – you’ll be able to put complicated information in a table,
Preview your listing. Remember to click that ‘Preview listing’ button to see what everything’s going to look like when it goes live. Good luck!
One of the best things you can put into your auction template to make it more appealing to buyers is something called a ‘SquareTrade seal’. This seal is a promise that you will handle any disputes using SquareTrade, an independent dispute resolution service. We’ll take a closer look at what it is and how to get one in the next email.
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eBay – Part Time or Full? How to Decide.
Going full-time as an eBay seller is living the dream: making a real income, working from home, being your own boss and all the rest of it. It’s the promise of a million scams, and it’s finally come true – at least for some.
What they don’t tell you in the success stories, though, is that becoming a full-time eBay seller is by no means for everyone. You really, really ought to try it part-time before you even consider taking it up full-time, and even then, caution is advisable. Before you burn your suit, here’s a list of questions you should ask yourself.
How Much Do I Earn From eBay Now?
Work out how many hours a week you spend doing eBay-related things (be honest here), and divide it by the average amount of profit you make in a week. If you were doing full-time hours, would you earn as much as you earn now?
Do I Have a Good Job?
Think about what you might lose if you give up your job to focus on eBay. If you’re in a well-paid job with good promotion prospects then it’s well worth reconsidering: you might get a few years down the line and wish you’d stayed in your traditional job, as you’d probably be the CEO by now.
Would I Really Make Much More Money?
Unless you’re selling a large quantity of small goods, most of what you do on eBay will be waiting for auctions to end – and you can wait at work just as easily as you can at home. This is why whether you would make more money on eBay really depends on what kinds of items you’re selling – for low value items, going full-time could be a good move. For high-value ones, the chances are you’ll hit the limits of how much money you have to invest in inventory long before you hit the limits on your time.
Is my Home a Good Place to Work?
Quite apart from anything else, you might find that the dream of home working is more of a nightmare in reality. People can start to depend on you to get things done that need to be done during the day. If you have a wife and children then they can resent the fact that you’re in the house but refuse to have anything to do with them for large parts of the day. Giving in to any of these things and stopping work for a while will cause your profits to fall.
Can I Survive if it All Goes Wrong?
In the end, would you be able to get by if you had a month or two where you sold literally nothing? Or would you be desperately looking around for a job and cursing the day you ever discovered eBay? That’s the real test.
If you made it through all these questions, then I guess you’re cut out for the eBay life – and even if you didn’t, you’d be surprised just how far you can get part-time. In our next email, we’ll show you how to think like the eBay elite: the PowerSellers.
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eBay: The First 10 Years.
Yes, you read that correctly: ten years. eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose. He wanted his site – then called ‘AuctionWeb’ – to be an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the first websites of its kind in the world. The name ‘eBay’ comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. His company’s name was Echo Bay, and the ‘eBay AuctionWeb’ was originally just one part of Echo Bay’s website at ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar’s broken laser pointer, which he got $14 for.
The site quickly became massively popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought them. Relying on trust seemed to work remarkably well, and meant that the site could almost be left alone to run itself. The site had been designed from the start to collect a small fee on each sale, and it was this money that Omidyar used to pay for AuctionWeb’s expansion. The fees quickly added up to more than his current salary, and so he decided to quit his job and work on the site full-time. It was at this point, in 1996, that he added the feedback facilities, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer.
In 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb’s – and his company’s – name to ‘eBay’, which is what people had been calling the site for a long time. He began to spend a lot of money on advertising, and had the eBay logo designed. It was in this year that the one-millionth item was sold (it was a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street).
Then, in 1998 – the peak of the dotcom boom – eBay became big business, and the investment in Internet businesses at the time allowed it to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took in public on the stock market. It started to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and quickly became a massive site where you could sell anything, large or small. Unlike other sites, though, eBay survived the end of the boom, and is still going strong today.
1999 saw eBay go worldwide, launching sites in the UK, Australia and Germany. eBay bought half.com, an Amazon-like online retailer, in the year 2000 – the same year it introduced Buy it Now – and bought PayPal, an online payment service, in 2002.
Pierre Omidyar has now earned an estimated $3 billion from eBay, and still serves as Chairman of the Board. Oddly enough, he keeps a personal weblog at http://pierre.typepad.com. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay – that’s a lot of laser pointers.
Now that you know the history of eBay, perhaps you’d like to know how it could work for you? Our next email will give you an idea of the possibilities.
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eBay Auction Pricing Strategies.
If your items aren’t selling, then you might have a bad pricing strategy. There as many pricing strategies in the world as there are buyers – if you look at two businesses selling the same thing, often the only difference you’ll be able to find between them is pricing.
The ‘Few Dollars More’ Strategy.
Here’s something you might not have thought of. If you set your auction’s starting price to what you would usually charge for Buy it Now, while setting the Buy it Now price a few dollars above, you can make a profit by setting off an interesting psychological reaction in the buyer’s mind.
Here’s what they’ll think. They want the item, but why should they bother bidding for it? After all, they could use Buy it Now for just a few dollars more, and be sure of getting it! Doing things this way makes the value of the Buy it Now option extra clear to the buyer, and makes them more willing to pay extra for the privilege.
The ‘One Dollar Less’ Strategy.
This is simple, but requires you to keep an eagle eye on your competition. As soon as they start a Buy it Now auction for an item you stock, start an auction for one of those items yourself. Match the title closely, but price your item one dollar less than theirs. This will mean that your auctions will sit together in the search results, and who’s going to see both and go for the one that’s a dollar more expensive?
The ‘Free Shipping’ Strategy.
Buyers really hate paying for shipping. With Buy it Now, you might find it easier to incorporate the shipping cost into the main price of the item, and then write “free shipping” in the auction’s title. You’d be surprised how many buyers would prefer to pay one price including shipping for the auction, instead of having shipping added on at the checkout. Again, this is psychological: they pay the same at the end, but it doesn’t feel like they’ve paid an unnecessary ‘extra’ cost for Internet shopping.
The ‘Go for It’ Strategy.
If you’d like a slightly more risky strategy, try this. List your item for the maximum duration (ten days), starting the listing on a Thursday so it goes across two weekends and finishes on a Sunday. Set the starting price to the minimum (one cent).
What you’re trying to do here is give bidders as long as possible to discover your auction, so that they push the price up themselves. Pay for a few upgrades like bold and highlight, to give them a helping hand. If you do this right, you can make a much bigger profit than you would have with any Buy it Now price, especially with a medium or high value item.
Since running your auction for longer means that more people see it, you should always take the longest duration of ten days, right? Not always. In the next email, we’ll talk about how long your eBay auction should run for.
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eBay Auction Starting and Ending Day Strategies.
It’s usually when auctions are about to end that they get half their bids – sometimes they even get their only bids. If you want your item to sell for a good price, then, it makes no sense to let it finish on a day and time when no-one’s going to be around to care.
Selling to Business.
If you’re selling business equipment and have mostly business customers, you should really aim to have your auctions finishing between 9am and 5pm on weekdays. It is worth, however, trying to avoid mornings and avoiding the ‘lead-in’ and ‘lead-out’ that takes place on Monday and Friday themselves.
Selling to Home.
If most of your sales are to private customers having it shipped to their own home, then you want your auctions to finish when these kind of customers will be around. Unfortunately, these times are the opposite of what they are for the business customers. The ideal time to catch a home customer is on a Sunday evening.
List for Durations.
In order to get your listings to end on a particular day, you can simply change the duration of your auctions depending on what day it is. For example, if you mostly sell to home customers and the day today is Thursday, then your auction needs to run for either 3 or 10 days to hit a Sunday. If you sell more to business and the day today is Friday, then:
a 1 day auction would be bad (finishing on Saturday),
3 days would be alright (Monday),
5 days would be good (Wednesday),
7 days would be good (another Friday),
and 10 days would be alright (Monday again).
You could draw up a little timetable of when you should and shouldn’t be listing depending on the days of the week – make it red, amber and green, traffic light style, and stick it on your wall.
Schedule Listings.
Of course, if that all sounds like too much trouble then there is an easier – if more expensive – way of doing things. Simply use any of the many tools that let you schedule listings (almost all listing programs and sites do) – you can set the start date for any day and time you feel like.
Be aware that you might have to pay a few cents per listing for this if you do it through eBay. With some software, you may also need to leave your computer on all the time, so the software can start the auctions when it’s supposed to. The advantage of this method, however, is that there will be no per-listing fee, since the auctions were scheduled through your computer and not through eBay.
If it’s the home market you’re after, then you might not have realised what one of the most powerful things to sell on eBay is. I’ll give you a clue: it’s not consumer electronics, or media products. It’s what eBay is famous for. Check out the next email for more.
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eBay Description Writing Tips.
Once you’ve drawn the buyers in with your title, the next thing to do is to tell them all about your item with the description. But just what should you write in your description?
At its heart, your item description is an ad. Without making it too obvious, you should be writing sales copy. You’re trying to get buyers excited about your products, and that’s usually hard – but on eBay, if you have the right thing to sell and give enough details, the buyers almost excite themselves.
Technical Details.
Include every technical detail you know, including the item’s manufacturer, its condition, how big it is, where and when it was made, its history, and anything else special about it. Don’t be too boring, though: the best descriptions are written in friendly, conversational language, and show a real knowledge of the item. Whatever you do, make sure you tell the truth!
Remember that most of the people who’ll be buying your item will be just as knowledgeable about it as you are, if not more – this is their hobby, and they’re experts. Don’t feel like you need to explain the basics of the item: just go into as much technical detail as you can. As a rule, don’t write anything in the description if you don’t know what it means, as the chances are someone will, and if you’ve got it slightly wrong then you’ll look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Interesting Details.
You might find that you enjoy writing a few things about how you got the item, why you’re selling it, and who you think might like it. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it gives your auctions some character and a personal touch, and can make people more likely to trust you. People might wonder what you’re doing selling 500 CDs all at once, and if you tell them the reason, then they’ll feel reassured that nothing dodgy is going on. If you’re selling them because you’re having a baby and you need the space, just say so.
Write as Much as You Can.
Leave nothing out of your description, even if that seems to you like it makes it cumbersomely long. There is no way you can be too thorough: someone, somewhere will appreciate that you took the time to write the extra information.
Don’t assume that anyone who wants extra information will email you to ask a question: many buyers are shy and won’t do it. Think of questions that buyers might have and add the answers to your description, as people generally tend to ask the same questions over and over again.
Each time a buyer does email you with a question, you should both answer their question and update your description so that it will include the answer next time. If people ask questions that are answered in the description, try putting these parts of the auction on a line alone, or in bold, to make them easier to notice.
In the next email, we’ll focus on increasing the number of buyers who respond to your auctions.
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EBay Income Possibilities.
If you’ve ever read an article about eBay, you will have seen the kinds of incomes people make – it isn’t unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay.
Next time you’re on eBay, take a look at how many PowerSellers there are: you’ll find quite a few. Now consider that every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, as that’s eBay’s requirement for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold PowerSellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top ranking is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month!
The fact that these people exist gives you come idea of the income possibilities here. Most of them never set out to even set up a business on eBay – they simply started selling a few things, and then kept going. There are plenty of people whose full-time job is selling things on eBay, and some of them have been doing it for years now. Can you imagine that? Once they’ve bought the stock, everything else is pretty much pure profit for these people – they don’t need to pay for any business premises, staff, or anything else. There are multi-million pound businesses making less in actual profit than eBay PowerSellers do.
Even if you don’t want to quit your job and really go for it, you can still use eBay to make a significant second income. You can pack up orders during the week and take them down to the post office for delivery each Saturday. There are few other things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near that kind of earning potential.
What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like: some PowerSellers are very old, or very young. Some live out in the middle of nowhere where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or being very poor. eBay tears down the barriers to earning that the real world constantly puts up. There’s no job interview and no commuting involved – if you can post things, you can do it.
Put it this way: if you know where to get something reasonably cheaply that you could sell, then you can sell it on eBay – and since you can always get discounts for bulk at wholesale, that’s not exactly difficult. Buy a job lot of something in-demand cheaply, sell it on eBay, and you’re making money already, with no set-up costs.
If you want to dip your toe in the water before you commit to actually buying anything, then you can just sell things that you’ve got lying around in the house. Search through that cupboard of stuff you never use, and you’ll probably find you’ve got a few hundred dollars’ worth of stuff lying around in there! This is the power of eBay: there is always someone who wants what you’re selling, whatever it might be, and since they’ve come looking for you, you don’t even need to do anything to get them to buy it.
So you want to get started on eBay? Well, that’s great! There are only a few little things you need to learn to get started. Our next email will give you the lowdown.
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eBay Title Writing Tips.
Trying to be help your buyers find your auctions can be a truly daunting task. Most people only search eBay by title, not by description, and that means that you only have those 55 characters of the title to cover all the possible search terms. That’s not easy. In this email, I’ll give you a few pointers.
Don’t bother with eBay clichés: There are plenty of eBay auction titles that say things like “Super rare camera wow look low price”. These are stupid things to put in your title, as no-one is going to search for them.
Think like a buyer: If you were looking for your item, then what exactly would you type into that box? If you think it’d help, try searching yourself to find someone else selling your item. What were the first things you thought of typing?
Think like other sellers: Keep an eye on which sellers are doing best with items like yours, and try to copy their title styles – if it works for them, it can work for you.
Be specific: You should be sure to write the item’s brand and specific model number in the title, as people will often search only for this information. Make sure that you also say exactly what the item is.
A Few Examples.
Here are a few examples of good titles. They’re real, and they’re on eBay right now, making their sellers money. So what makes them good?
“Dell Latitude Laptop P3 500mhz Notebook PC Computer”
If you know about computers, you’ll know instantly what this auction is selling. It has manufacturer (Dell) and product line (Latitude), followed by a few technical specifications (P3 500mhz is the processor speed). Notice also that the title includes the four words ‘laptop’, ‘notebook’, ‘PC’ and ‘computer’, as the seller wants people looking for any of those words to see his auction.
“OASIS Don't Believe the Truth CD Album (New)”
This auction for a CD is well formatted: it gives the artist name in capital letters, followed by the album name. It then manages to include the two key words ‘CD’ and ‘album’, as well as the word ‘new’ – that means that anyone searching for ‘new oasis cd’, ‘oasis new album’ and so on will find this auction.
“1840 Penny Black stamp, certificate, four margins”
Here’s a slightly more obscure one, from the exciting world of stamp collecting. A penny black is one of the oldest and most famous stamps. It uses a few key words that collectors will consider important: ‘four margins’ indicates that the stamp has been cut out with some margins around it and so isn’t damaged, and ‘certificate’ tells you that the item has a certificate of authenticity – it’s a real penny black. Remember to use every bit of space to squeeze in as much important information as you can in the title.
So now that you’ve written a winning title, you need to start on a great description. The next email will show you how.
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How do Dutch Auctions Work on eBay?
A multiple-item (‘Dutch’) auction is an auction where more than one of the same item is being sold at once. There are two kinds of Dutch auctions.
Without Bidding.
The most common Dutch auctions are actually a combination of two auction types: they’re multiple-item fixed price auctions (Dutch Buy it Now auctions to you and me). This just means that you can offer more than one of an item at a time for a fixed price.
This is very powerful if you’re selling something small in large quantities. You can just say how many of the item you have, and the Buy it Now auction will stay there until its duration is up or all the items have been sold.
Buyers aren’t limited to only buying one item at a time, either: they can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them. If you’re selling small things loose, then this can be really great – instead of selling them in packs of 50, you can sell 24 to one person and 95 to the next. It lets buyers save money by buying exactly what they need, and it lets you offer them the flexibility to have as many or few of an item as they want.
With Bidding.
Dutch auctions can also be done by bidding, but the process is rather complicated. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. Let’s say there are 10 of an item for sale. Anne bids $5 each for 4, while Bob bids $4 for 6. Anne will get her 4 and Bob will get his 6, but they will both only pay $4.
Here’s another example. If there are 5 items for sale and Anne, Bob, Carol and Dean want to buy 2 each, then obviously someone is going to lose out. Whoever bid the lowest will only get one of the item. If Anne bid $5 each, Bob bid $4 each, Carol bid $3 each, and Dean bid $2 each, then Anne will get 2, Bob will get 2, Carol will get 1 and poor Dean gets nothing. So then: how much they pay for the items?
Starting to sound like a particularly evil math problem, isn’t it? The answer is that everyone will pay $3, as Carol’s bid was the lowest one that won anything. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don’t worry – everyone else does too! That’s why Dutch auctions with bidding are so rare.
In fact, even eBay's normal one-item auction format has all sorts of problems, not least of which is auction sniping. Snipers are buyers who come along at the last minute to bid a few cents more than the highest bidder and win the item. Your buyers will find this infuriating – and you’re the only one with any power to help them out by stopping it. The next email will show you what you can do.
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How eBay Consignment Centers Work.
You might not ever have heard of eBay consignment centers – don’t worry, most people haven’t, as they’re a relatively new concept. The idea is that you drop off anything you want sold, and then the consignment center will sell it for you and share the profits.
You Can Sell at Consignment Centers.
Just find something to sell and take it to a consignment center – they’ll sell it for you on eBay, handling all the listing, description and shipping.
You do, however, give up some profit when you sell through a consignment center, not to mention losing all control over your auctions – and who’s to say that you couldn’t sell it better than they can? The chances are they will only give you a fraction of the item’s real value, to the point where you might as well have just taken it to the pawn shop.
You Can Be a Consignment Center.
A better option is to be a consignment center for the non-eBay-using public in your area. After you’ve been selling things on eBay for a while and you’ve told a few people about it, someday a friend will walk up to you and say “Hey, could you sell this on eBay for me?” Give it a try – if you like doing it, then why not start up your own consignment center business?
Put an ad like this in your local newspaper or anywhere else you think is appropriate:
“Create Space and Get Money For Doing It! How would you like someone to come and clean out the old stuff in your house that’s taking up all your space, and then give you cash for the lot? I am currently looking for things to sell on eBay and I can do this for you. Call me on [your number].”
Go round to a few people’s houses and take some things that you think are sellable, giving the items’ owners a sensible amount for them – not too much, since they don’t know how much they’re worth. It’s best to try to take things that are part of a set or collection, so you can sell lots of the same kinds of items. You’re in a strong position: why would they so no when you’re offering them money for things that, to them, are rubbish?
The only requirement to be successful with this is that you need to know what you’re doing, and be able to spot a high-value item when you see one, regardless of what it might be. It’s also worth opening a new account to sell items you get from other people. You can’t guarantee quality as well, and your regular account should only be used to sell the one kind of item that you decided you’re an expert in.
One thing many sellers don’t realise when they sell items is that they need to change their strategy depending on what season it is – things sell for different prices depending on the time of year. We’ll take a look at this in the next email.
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How Long Should your eBay Auction Run?
When it comes to durations, you have a wide range of choices: your auction can run for 10, 7, 5 or 3 days, or even only one day if you have a good enough feedback rating.
There’s a reason why you get to choose your duration, and that’s because different durations are good for different things. To decide how long you should list your items for, all you need to do is ask yourself a few questions.
Do you want to sell things quickly? If you’d rather sell now than in a few days, even if it means losing a little of your profit, then go ahead and choose the shortest duration you can get. If you’re the more patient type, on the other hand, you might as well sell slowly.
How much is your item worth? Items with a higher price are worth re-listing every 3 days or so using Buy it Now. The fees aren’t that big as a percentage of the item’s cost, and you’ll sell more when you’re constantly higher up in the search results.
Could your item benefit from competitive bidding? Not every item is going to make bidders get excited and try to outbid each other. If you have items that consistently attract more than five bidders, though, you should always list then for as long as possible, to get the best price you can. People will be quite happy to follow your auction for days, bidding the price higher and higher as they go.
What did the seller getting the best price do? Go back to that completed items display, and take a look at which durations the top seller uses the most often. The chances are that what they’re doing works.
Can you ship quickly? You might find that customers get frustrated if they have to wait for over a week for your auction to end, only to have to wait some more for the item to actually turn up. If you’re running auctions with the longest duration, try to have the thing packed and ready to go for posting the day it ends.
Is there a rush on? If it’s the holiday period, or there’s a sudden surge in demand for your particular item, then don’t list items for as long as you would usually. It’s in your interest to have a quick turnover, then you should be listing for the minimum of one day.
How visible do you want to be? You might have noticed that most of the effects caused by varying item durations are basically caused by the fact that, by default, eBay sorts search results so that items ending sooner appear first. Since it’s the default, this is the view most people use – meaning that items ending sooner get viewed much more.
If you’d like a few more tips about increasing your auction’s visibility on eBay, make sure to check out the next email. See you there!
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How to Avoid Being a Victim of eBay Buyer’s Fraud.
From everything you’ve heard about the risk of fraud on eBay, you might think it’s only buyers getting scammed – but you couldn’t be more wrong. Here are a few common scams that sellers fall for every day.
The Rubber Cheque.
This one obviously isn’t limited to eBay – it’s been going on for years in all kinds of business. It works like this: a buyer sends you a cheque that they don’t have the funds to cover and you pay it in your bank. You then send the goods right away, only to find out a few days later that the cheque bounced.
The solution to this is simple: don’t send anything to a buyer until their payment has cleared, no matter how quickly they might say they need it. Advise them to pay electronically if they don’t want to wait so long for their items. Then again, if your items are quite small, you could just take the loss from an occasional bounced cheque. Think of it as a small price to pay for faster and better customer service.
‘I Never Bought Anything!’
This is one of the riskiest scams to fall victim to. In this case, the credit card’s real owner still has control over it – no-one has stolen their details. They have realised, however, that they can phone up the bank who issued their card to say that it’s being used fraudulently and they never bought any such thing, and the bank will often reverse the transaction without even investigating. The only way to beat this scam is to make all your sales through eBay, as they keep a record of transactions.
The Unconfirmed Address.
It is quite easy to steal PayPal accounts from inexperienced users: all you need, after all, is their email address and password. PayPal tries to protect against credit cards registered on stolen accounts being used to buy things by listing a ‘confirmed address’ for each buyer – an address that matches what is registered with their credit card issuer.
What many scammers will do is ask you to ship to a different address – unless you’re very sure of them, this is a bad idea, as they could be trying to commit credit card fraud. Be especially suspicious of anyone who wants to pay a higher price and get overnight shipping, especially if not even to the same country as the confirmed address. The fraudster is trying to make sure the item reaches them before they are discovered.
It’s up to you to take responsibility for fraud on PayPal, as eBay’s favourite way to refund fraudulent payments to their rightful owner is to just reverse it from you! This is considered an occupational risk of PayPal usage, and sellers who get burned severely sometimes go as far as moving to a rival electronic payment service. See www.nopaypal.com for more.
In the next email, we’ll take a closer look at PayPal, and ask: should it be the only kind of payment you accept?
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How to Choose the Right eBay Product Category.
Some people think it’s easy to choose the right eBay category, and often it is. Sometimes, though, it might not be quite clear exactly what to go for.
Why is it Even Important?
Plenty of people use the category system to find items, when they’re not looking for something specific. If your item is listed in the wrong category – or you’ve just given up and listed it in ‘Everything Else’ – then these people aren’t going to find your auction.
Also, listing items in the wrong categories is against eBay’s rules, and eBay say they will remove any auctions that are wrongly categorised. They don’t often actually do this, but it’s not worth the risk – especially since breaking any rules can cause them to penalise your account, including losing PowerSeller status if you have it.
So What Can You Do?
eBay will suggest categories for you when you sell your item, if you type in a few words to describe the item on the category selection page and click ‘search’. You can make the best of this feature by typing in exactly what your item is, with brand name and model number (if any), so that eBay can find the best category for you.
If that doesn’t work for you, then search yourself for items like yours, and pay attention to which category most of them seem to be in (you can see this near the top of each item’s description page). Try different words and see which ones come back with the most results. You can also browse through all the available categories from eBay’s front page.
Remember that the more specific the category is, the better – use as many subcategories as are appropriate. Don’t just list your HP laptop in the ‘Computers’ category, for example – list it in ‘Computers > Laptops > HP’. Don’t worry: your item will still appear in the ‘Computers’ category, as well as ‘Computers > Laptops’, because items listed in subcategories are always listed in every category above.
Take some time to look through all the categories and get familiar with the way eBay as a whole is laid out. After all, that’s better than getting a few months down the line and finding that you still think of eBay’s category system like it’s some kind of scary jungle.
What if More Than One Category Fits?
Don’t worry, eBay have you covered. For a small extra fee, you can list your item in an extra category, to increase the number of potential buyers who will see it. This isn’t always worth it, though – some items only really fit properly in one category, and listing them in extra categories is just a waste.
Once you know where to list your item, the next step is to write your auction’s title. The title is the most important thing about your auction – the difference between a good title and a bad title can be the difference between $10 and $100. That’s why I’ll take you through the dos and don’ts in the next email.
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How to Determine What’s Really Selling on eBay.
If you want to make the most money you can on eBay, then you need to know what sells. But how can you find that out?
The Manual Way.
If you’re just starting out, you might find it easier to simply go to your category, tick ‘Completed listings’ in the left-hand menu, and then click the ‘Show items’ button. Sort them by highest price first, and there you have it: the items that sell for the highest prices. In most categories this will change often, but it’s still useful to know – if you think you can get an item quickly for less than the kind of prices it is selling for, then go for it.
eBay's search interface can be slow and hard to use, however, and you’re unlikely to discover everything you could learn this way. There’s more than one way to do things, though.
The Statistical Way.
If you’d prefer to do a little hardcore statistical analysis to determine what’s selling and what not, then don’t worry – you can do that too.
eBay make all their market data available to third-party developers through what’s called a ‘programming interface’ – this basically means that you have a wide choice of programs that can take market statistics from eBay and analyse them for you. Type ‘ebay analysis’ into a search engine for a long list.
In my opinion, some of the best eBay statistics tools out there are made by Andale (www.andale.com). Andale are one of the oldest and most established sellers of services for eBay. However, their solution is web-based, and you may prefer to buy a piece of software that you can install on your computer, such as AuctionIntelligence.
These automated programs will almost do everything for you, and come with help and tutorials. You should be aware, however, that eBay charge them for the data, which means that they will never give you their programs for free.
Keep Your Finger on Pulse.
If you want a quick, big-picture snapshot of what people are looking to buy on eBay, then go to http://pulse.ebay.com. This is a page where eBay list the top 10 most searched for words, and the top 5 largest eBay stores.
Looking at it, it’s easy to spot current trends. For example, right now all of the top stores are selling media items, either books or music. That suggests that these are good things to be selling, at least if you want to shift volume. Right now the word ‘ipod’ is at number 4, and ‘ipod mini’ is at number 6 – there are a heck of a lot of people out there looking for a cheap iPod or iPod mini. If you could find a good supplier for them then you could make a lot of money.
If you’re having trouble finding suppliers, though, don’t worry: there’s more than one way to get hold of things to sell on eBay. The next email will give you a few tips.
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How to Dispute Unfair Ratings on eBay.
So you’ve done everything you can to keep your buyers happy – but still someone’s left you negative feedback! You don’t think it’s fair, either because you fixed the buyer’s problem, or they never gave you a fair chance to fix it. What can you do?
Communicate.
Tell the buyer that you don’t think that feedback was fair, and give them a list of the things you’ll do in exchange for them withdrawing it. You can offer refunds, replacements, or even to ‘compensate them for their time’ (that means bribe them), depending on how desperate you are. If they agree, you can go through the mutual withdrawal process detailed below.
Respond.
Leave a comment under the negative feedback explaining what happened – this at least minimises the damage it will do to your reputation if anyone looks at it. Remember that you can more-or-less write whatever you want, as there is no facility for the buyer to respond to your response – and anything you write will show up on their ‘Feedback Left for Others’ page! If you’re a little devious, you can make them look very bad.
Retaliate.
However much you’re not supposed to do it, you really shouldn’t let a buyer leave you negative feedback without leaving them a negative in return. Be polite and factual, saying something like “buyer did not give me a fair opportunity to fix their complaint” (note that this is one of the reasons why you should always leave feedback second, or not at all). This might not be the ‘nicest’ way to do business on eBay, but it’s the only realistic way to protect your flawless reputation.
Don’t be worried: retaliatory feedback is not against eBay’s rules, however much it should be. Anyway, you’re not just doing this for revenge – it’s essential for the next step.
Try for a Mutual Withdrawal.
Since the buyer probably won’t want a negative response or feedback comment on their record, you can do a simple “I’ll take away my negative if you take away yours” deal. This is called mutual feedback withdrawal, and the process can be started at this page: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MFWRequest.
This will cause eBay’s system to send an email to your buyer, asking them if they agree to withdraw their feedback in exchange for you withdrawing yours. You should get them to agree before you press the button, though, because you can only use it once per transaction.
Use Dispute Resolution.
You and the buyer can take your feedback dispute to SquareTrade, where you can both give your side and they will cancel feedback that they feel is unfair – they are far more responsive than eBay. Be aware that this costs about $20, but it has the advantage that if the buyer doesn’t respond to the process then their feedback will be removed automatically.
Of course, at some point you might find yourself with an even worse buyer than one that just leaves negative feedback – they might refuse to pay, or harass your other buyers. Our next email will tell you how to get in touch with eBay's ‘Safe Harbor’ team, and what they can do for you.
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How to Get Help from eBay’s SafeHarbor Team.
SafeHarbor are the eBay police department. If a buyer does something they're not supposed to, then it's SafeHarbor you should be reporting it to.
Non-paying Buyers.
This is the most common rule buyers break -- it's all too easy for them to just change their minds and try to get out of the auction. eBay, however, regard every auction as a contract. They will punish the buyer for you if they don't go through with their end of the deal, by giving them a ‘strike’ against their account. A buyer who doesn’t consistently doesn’t pay for items they win will probably get banned.
To report a non-paying buyer, you need to file an ‘Unpaid Item’ dispute, which you can do here: http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CreateDispute. All you need is the item number. Once you do this, eBay will send the buyer a reminder that they must pay for the item they won, wait a while, and then take action against them. You must wait 7 days before you can file a dispute.
This isn't that helpful to you, of course, since in most cases you still won't get paid for the item or have anyone to post it to: it is a rare buyer who responds to eBay's threats and pays up just to avoid a little warning from eBay. You will, however, at least get a refund of your final value fee and be able to relist the item for free – and you can send a second chance offer to someone else if you want.
Auction Interference.
If someone ends up with a grudge against you, then you might find that they start emailing your bidders and telling them that you’re a scammer, they should cancel they bid, they shouldn’t deal with you, and so on. You might even find that you have unscrupulous competitors who will try this tactic to get buyers to bid on their auctions instead!
SafeHarbor will investigate this for you – the procedure to report it is to click ‘Help’ on the toolbar, then ‘Contact us’ from the menu. This can be a bit of a maze: you need to choose ‘Report problems with other eBay members’, then ‘Problems with buyers’, then finally ‘User is emailing buyers to warn them about seller or item’. This will then let you send SafeHarbor an email.
Feedback Extortion.
You might find that someone tries to intimidate you into giving them something using the threat of negative feedback – in its crudest form, this could be as simple as “Pay me $20 or I’ll leave you a negative comment”.
To report this to SafeHarbor, you should also use ‘Contact Us’, making sure you attach all the emails you have that prove the extortion happened.
You know, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Maybe you’re not be having all that many problems with the buyers you do get, but you seem to be having a problem with items that just don’t sell. Never fear: the next email will give you some hints on what could be going wrong.
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How to Increase Your Auction’s Visibility on eBay.
Once you’ve optimised your titles for search terms and your items have short durations to get them near the top of the results, there’s really only one sure-fire way to make your auction stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, it involves paying eBay more money – but it can really pay off, especially for higher-priced items.
In this email, I’ll take you through the various ‘listing upgrades’ eBay offer, how much they cost, and whether they’re any good. Remember that if you want any of these, you can just tick their box while you’re going through the process of listing your item. The charges will be added to the other fees you’re charged for the listing.
Gallery. The most basic of upgrades, this will show your photo on the search results page as well as inside on the item’s description page. This is always worth having. Cost: 35c.
Subtitle. If you add a subtitle, you get a little more space to fit in any extra information that you couldn’t squeeze into the title. Use this if you’re selling a relatively technical item that just has too many good features to fit into that 55-letter title space. Cost: 50c.
Bold. This will put your auction’s title in bold on search results pages. Not especially noticeable, but might make your auction stand out a little. Cost: $1.
Border. Choose this option to put your listing inside a coloured box on results pages, making it look a bit special. Cost: $3.
Highlight. You can get your listing highlighted in purple on results pages. Cost: $5.
Featured Plus. This upgrade will show your item at the top of the page in the search results, with the ‘featured items’, for the duration of your listing. It will also be shown in the featured items list seen by people who browse by category. This is easily the best upgrade you can buy, and will easily pay for itself twice over with an item that’s worth more than about $100 and getting a decent number of bids. Cost: $19.95.
Gallery Featured. This will show your item first when someone chooses to view items using the ‘Picture Gallery’ view. Few people ever use this view, but it might be useful for some kinds of items. Cost: $19.95.
Home Page Featured. This is the ultimate in listing upgrades, but its value is questionable, especially given the small space featured items are actually given on the home page. If you think you could pull a lot of buyers into your auction with nothing but the first four or five words of your title, go for it. Really, you have to get yourself on the home page at least once in your eBay life, don’t you? Cost: $39.95.
Instead of going to expense to get new buyers through the listings, perhaps you should talk to your existing ones and create some new sales opportunities that way? If you’d like to know how, be sure to read the next email.
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How to Increase Your eBay Backend Sales.
It shouldn’t too hard to increase your eBay backend sales – because the chances are you currently aren’t making any! Backend sales are sales to customers who have already bought an item, also known as ‘up-selling’. These are usually easier sales to make than normal sales: in sales-speak, your existing customers are ‘warm leads’.
It’s a technique you’ve probably noticed being used on you in shops: you buy something, and you’re offered a $5 piece of equipment to keep it clean, or make it easier to use. The usual human response is to say to yourself “heck, what’s another five dollars – it might be useful”. It’s just another five dollars to them, but they might have just added 20% to your profit margin.
Figure Out What Goes Together.
Out of the things you stock, which cheaper things are there that could be useful to someone who now owns one of the more expensive ones? For example, if you sell digital cameras, the backend product is digital camera memory – they never come with enough out of the box. The backend products for a printer would be ink and paper. Try to think laterally!
If you can’t think of anything, take a look around at the cheaper ‘extra’ items that your competitors offer, and see if you can find a supplier for them. There are very few product areas where this technique doesn’t apply.
Include Letters in Packages.
When you send items out in the post, include a brief sales letter with products you think might be of interest to the customer. It’s like sending out a personalised, targeted catalogue to your customers with every purchase. Again, you’ll find that a significant percentage of people won’t have bothered to look at what else you were selling, and will go back to buy a few more things.
To stop people from just putting such a letter aside and thinking they won’t do anything about it right now, you might like to include some kind of limited time offer – 10% off if you order within the next month, for example.
Email Your Customers.
Each time you sell something to a customer, you get valuable market information about them, and they get to see that they can trust you as a seller. That’s why backend sales are so powerful. Keep your customers updated in your newsletter, making sure you list any new products there that you might have in stock. The chances are that these customers will be far more eager to buy from you.
Consumable Products.
If the product that the customer bought from you to begin with is consumable (it will run out), then this is a special case. You shouldn’t try to make the backend sale straight away, but should instead wait long enough that the average customer would have just run out of the product. That’s the time to strike.
If you want to keep your buyers, then you need to provide good customer service. Our next email will show you exactly how to reduce eBay buyers’ complaints.
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How to Leave Great Buyer Feedback.
So your buyer has paid on time, you’ve shipped them the item, and they’ve left you positive feedback. Everything is going great! You know that leaving your buyer some nice feedback will finish everything off, and make them glad they chose to buy from you.
When you see that little feedback box, though, you might find that you have no idea what to write to make your buyer happiest. Well, here’s a guide.
Don’t write “A++++++++”. Once upon a time, leaving grades on eBay buyers actually meant something. Now, though, writing an ‘A’ and filling the rest of the space with pluses seems to have become a common way of saying ‘good’. The meaning of the grades is gone entirely – no one ever leaves a B-, after all – so it’s a pretty useless thing to write. Try something more descriptive.
‘Prompt/fast/instant payment’. Did the buyer get on PayPal within hours or even minutes of winning the auction and pay you as quickly as they could? If they did, then your comment should include the words ‘prompt payment’. This is a big thing for buyers, as other sellers will really prefer to deal with someone they know will pay on time.
‘Great communication’. If you found the buyer was very responsive to all your emails, then point this out. It’s especially worth putting this if there was a problem that you had to overcome, and the buyer was co-operative and easy to work with.
‘A pleasure to deal with’. If this was one of those very easy transactions where nothing went wrong, then you should put that the buyer was a pleasure to deal with, or ‘the way ebay should be’, or just a ‘great ebayer’.
‘Great as always’. When it’s the second or third time that the buyer has bought from you, make sure to point it out. The fact that they go back to the same seller more than once and build up a relationship is a good thing for them to have on their record.
The Main Rule: Praise to the Skies.
Think of anything good you have to say and try to fit as much of it as you can in that limited space. Don’t worry too much about punctuation. Here’s a good example comment: “Instant payment, great communication - excellent buyer!”.
As a side effect, this then gives you the power to leave slightly negative feedback for some buyers without actually having to make it negative, like this: “Paid quite quickly, communication fine”. Making very short, to-the-point comments also reflects badly on the buyer: if you just write “OK”, it means “I really wanted to leave a neutral or a negative”. Don’t do this if that’s not the meaning you intend.
Don’t spend too much time agonising over what to write in your feedback comments, though – the chances are you’ll be leaving hundreds every week. You might find it worthwhile to come up with a few standard ones for different situations, and use eBay’s Selling Manager to leave feedback in bulk.
Of course, before you can leave your buyer any feedback, you need to make sure they’ve paid you. Luckily getting your buyer to pay is easy, as eBay handle most of it for you. In the next email, we’ll take a tour of eBay’s checkout.
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How to Make More Money with eBay’s Affiliate Program.
If you’ve been on the web for a while, the chances are that at some time or other you will have taken part in an affiliate program. They generally work by giving you a URL to send people to their site that contains your affiliate number, and then giving you a small amount for each person who comes in using your link and signs up or buys something.
eBay's affiliate program follows this basic formula, but with a few twists.
It pays a lot. Each user who follows your link to eBay, signs up and then bids on anything within 30 days will earn you $20. Most affiliate programs will only give you something like 10% of the user’s first purchase. What’s more, for each existing eBay user who clicks through from your site and then places a bid or buys something, you’ll get 10c.
You can be your own affiliate. If you just link to your own auctions with your affiliate link number from your own website, then you’re getting money without sending buyers to anyone except yourself. There aren’t many affiliate programs that can say that.
So Where Do I Sign Up?
You can visit eBay’s affiliate program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/. Once you’re there, just click ‘Join the Program’. You will then be required to sign up for Commission Junction, which is free.
How Can I Get People to Click the Links?
eBay suggest a number of ‘business models’ for their affiliates. Before people can click your affiliate links, they need to be at your website. There are two ways to get them there using a search engine, which eBay refer to as ‘natural’ and ‘paid’ search.
Natural search: This is when someone finds your website in a search engine’s normal results, either because something you wrote is relevant to them or you used SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques. Be careful not to use any dodgy methods to get a high search engine ranking, though, or eBay might come after you and keep your affiliate money.
Paid search: This strategy involves paying for traffic to your website or directly to eBay, by buying ads on search engines. If you go for this option, it’s actually worth placing ads on the less popular search engines instead of the big ones: they’ll have similar click-through rates as a percentage, but the cost typically won’t be anywhere near as high.
Content: What you can do is just have a normal website, with articles on a variety of subjects and perhaps a community forum. Run the website for pleasure, but place the occasional eBay affiliate link there.
Newsletters: Don’t ignore the potential of putting your affiliate ID in each time you send out a newsletter. You can get 10c for every bid it generates with no extra work, which could be enough for the email to pay for itself, whether it leads to any sales or not.
Sadly, our time together is nearly at an end, but there is one thing that I have left to show you. It’s called the featured gallery, and it could help your sales. Look out for the next email!
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How to Market Your eBay Business.
So you want to market your eBay business? Well, you probably won’t have too much luck with traditional marketing methods – they’re just not targeted enough. The best way to do things is to pay for targeted advertising, which comes up when people search for keywords you specify: they’re looking for exactly what you’re selling, and so many of them will click on your ad.
On eBay.
You might not have noticed that eBay offer this kind of advertising, but they do. You can pay them for a small ad that will appear above the search results (next to the banner ad) for any keywords you want. Buyers will then be able to click through and get to your eBay store – and you only pay for clicks, not for views. You can also set a budget for how much you want to spend, and your ads will simply stop if they go over-budget.
If you do this, it is best to create very targeted ads for specific products. Buy a specific model of something as your keyword, and write how much you sell it for in the ad – this will be more effective than just advertising across the name of a whole category.
There are some products that this approach simply doesn’t work for, though, and you might be better off spending your money on a more visible Featured Plus listing for your item, especially if you’re trying to advertise on valuable keywords.
Search Engine Ads.
If you want to market your business more widely, then you can try to bring in business from outside eBay. The best way to do this is by buying keyword-targeted ads on search engines. With Google AdWords, for example, your ad will appear in their ‘Sponsored Links’ section when someone searches for your keywords. Again, you set a maximum budget and only pay for clicks.
This can be very effective, as you’ve just taken your products to the world outside eBay – imagine someone going to a search engine, typing in what they’re looking for and seeing your store right there! What’s more, if you target this approach to specific models of a product it can be very cheap. Most advertisers try to get as much traffic as they can instead of targeting their ads as specifically as you will be, meaning there won’t be much competition for the keywords.
eBay benefit from this as well as you, since it drives new buyers to eBay as a whole, not just to your site. They actively encourage sellers to go and advertise on search engines by offering you 75% of your final value fee back for each item that someone finds and buys this way. On expensive items, that’s probably enough to pay for the advertising to begin with!
If you’d really like to try a little marketing in the real world, though, you might want to make some flyers. Did you know that eBay can do this for you automatically? The next email will tell you how.
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How to Place Your eBay Store on “Vacation”.
So you’re going away for a while, and you’re not going to be able to ship people’s orders from your eBay store? Imagine how you’d feel if you got home from a nice vacation, only to find that your feedback rating had been trashed!
Buyers can find your store, pay for items, and then complain about you for not shipping them or responding to emails – without you even being there to stop it. What’s more, no-one will accept the fact you were on vacation as an excuse: after all, what were you doing listing items on eBay if you were on vacation?
So what’s the solution to this little problem? Well, it’s easier than it sounds. Whenever you go on vacation, just make sure you don’t forget to send your eBay store on one of its own.
What Do You Mean?
eBay offer a facility to put your store on ‘vacation’, which basically means that it is temporarily suspended while you’re unavailable to ship items. This means that you don’t need to be available 365 days a year just in case someone orders from your eBay store.
How Do I Put the Store on Vacation, Then?
Go to My eBay and click ‘Manage Your Store’. Now click ‘Change vacation settings’ and choose ‘Turn vacation settings on’. Click the ‘Save Settings’ button, and it’s done. Once the settings are on, you have a few options about what you want your store to do while you’re away.
Hide your listings. You need to do this – your listings will be hidden from buyers, so they can’t bid on them. Be aware that it can take a few hours for your listings to disappear from the search results, though.
Display messages. If you want, eBay can put a message in your listings and on your store to say that you’ve gone on vacation – just in case anyone wonders what happened to you. You will be asked to say when you expect to come back. You should always do this, as it’s quite inconsiderate to just disappear without telling your loyal customers where you went!
Will I Still be Charged for My Store While I’m Away?
Unfortunately you will – not only the subscription for the store, but also for any listings that expire while you were gone. This is quite cruel of eBay, but what can you do? To lessen the impact of this, make sure you don’t list any new items for a while before you put the store on vacation.
I’m Back! How Do I Turn the Store on Again?
Click: My eBay, Manage Your Store, Change vacation settings, Turn vacation settings off, Save Settings. Everything will now go back to normal. You might want to send out a newsletter at this point, to let your buyers know you’re back.
Here’s another little headache that could get you into some trouble: eBay’s ‘VeRO’ program for copyright holders. I’ll show you how to avoid falling foul of it in the next email.
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How to Reduce eBay Buyer Complaints.
Buyers are funny creatures, aren’t they? One minute they’re over the moon because they’ve got themselves a bargain, and the next they’re upset because their bargain seller doesn’t provide first-class customer service. There’s only really one way to reduce complaints: give these people what they want!
Post as soon as you can: The number one cause of eBay complaints are impatient or anxious buyers, who want to know when their item is going to turn up. If you get an order on Monday and wait until Saturday to post it, that’s bad customer service. Try to post items at least twice a week, to avoid making your buyers wait too long.
Make the description crystal clear: You need to make sure that your buyers know exactly what they’re buying, so they won’t be surprised when it turns up and isn’t exactly what they expect. Don’t be afraid to describe small defects in your description – it’s better to list it there than have buyers discover it for themselves later. If you get a lot of confusion about something, say it twice or even three times, and say it in a large font.
List all costs up-front: Don’t hide away your shipping costs if you think they’re too high – nothing will annoy buyers more than keeping costs secret until you expect them to be paid. If you really don’t want to display your shipping costs, just offer ‘free’ shipping and add the shipping costs to the item’s price.
Pack well: Spend as much as you need to on packing materials, and be careful with it. Remember that your item is going to have to travel through the post, and you want it to arrive in the condition it left. Wrap things securely in a few inches of a material like bubble wrap or stryofoam, and be sure to use a sturdy box. If you go around using boxes from the supermarket and old newspapers, expect things to break in the post.
Tell them to complain: This might sound a little counter-intuitive, but one of the best ways to stop your customers from complaining is to tell them to contact you if they have any complaints. Most people only complain if they feel a seller is unresponsive and confrontation – asking people to complain is more likely to get you shy and polite enquiries than complaints. You might not believe it now, but try it for a while and you’ll see your customer relations improve.
Respond to emails promptly: Check your email as often as you can, and never leave an email around to respond to later or tomorrow. Having to wait days to have their email answered upsets customers more than anything, especially if they’re already waiting for their item – it makes them feel stranded and powerless. Always respond to emails as soon as you can, and certainly within a maximum of 24 hours.
However much you might try to stop your buyers from complaining, though, someone will sooner or later.
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How to Report and Handle eBay Transaction Problems.
Even when there aren’t any disputes, you might run into a few transaction problems on eBay – glitches that aren’t really anyone’s fault, but are just the result of a technical malfunction or another situation beyond the buyer or seller’s control. The number one cause of problems like this is email.
Email Problems.
If you use the Internet a lot, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the problems eBay can cause, and many buyers and sellers are relying on email to keep them informed about their transactions.
Sometimes, you might find that your emails to a seller bounce –you might have the wrong email address, or there could be a problem with their email. This happens especially often when buyers have free webmail accounts at places like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.
When this happens, the buyer might not know you’re trying to contact them. Consider it urgent to contact them in the real world, before they leave you bad feedback. To find out someone’s real-world contact details, follow these steps: Click ‘Advanced Search’ near the top of your eBay screen, then ‘Find Contact Information’ in the menu on the left (under the ‘Members’ heading). All you need to do then is enter the other users’ eBay ID and the item number of what they bought.
You might find that the address you end up getting doesn’t exist, and the phone number seems to be disconnected, or wrong. However, if you didn’t get any working contact information for the buyer, then this means they’ve violated eBay’s contact information policy. You can report them at http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/identity-false.html, and nothing that they do from then on will reflect badly on you.
Be patient, though: Don’t send masses of angry emails to someone’s account: for all you know, they might be having problems with their computer or their Internet connection. Try phoning, and try waiting a while for a response.
PayPal problems.
You might also find that you have problems with people who aren’t quite sure how PayPal works. For example, they might try to send you money directly and send the wrong amount – this means that you need to refund any overpayment and get them to pay underpayment. If your buyer is reasonable, though, this should be an easy enough problem to solve – remember that they’re hardly going to refuse to pay the right amount when you’ve already got some of their money!
If Nothing Helps, Who Do I Report It To?
You need to click ‘Help’ on the toolbar and then ‘Contact us’, to contact eBay’s customer service. You might find you have better luck with the ‘Live Help’ function than you do with trying to get sensible responses to emails. PayPal have the same procedure – ‘Help’ then ‘Contact us’ – and offer limited phone support if you need it.
If you run lots of auctions at once, some of your problems might be caused simply by things getting lost and forgotten, because you have no way of keeping track of them. In the next email, we’ll look at how to manage multiple auctions effectively.
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How to Respond to an eBay Buyer’s Complaint.
At some point in your eBay selling life, one of your customers is going to send you a complaint. As long as you respond to it properly, however, it’s easy to keep a complaint from turning into a crisis.
Respond Immediately and Grovellingly.
Someone might complain to you directly, or they might do it through eBay. Whatever happens, you need to email them immediately. Here’s a template to use:
“I have just received your complaint and
