eBay and Customer Service

If you are running an eBay business, you may not realize that the need for great customer service still exists – even for online auctions. When a buyer receives quality customer service from you, they will potentially do one of two things – or both. They will give you great feedback, and they may look for more of your auctions in the future. If you hope to make a living from eBay, you have to stop thinking of it as an “auction” and start running it like a “business.”

If you owned a brick and mortar business, how would you treat your customer while they were standing at your counter, waiting for you to finish ringing up their order? You would be helpful and respectful of course! You would do everything that you could to guarantee that customers return to your establishment in the future. You would bend over backwards to make sure that their buying experience with you was both satisfactory and enjoyable. Why would you do any less at the close of one of your eBay auctions?

First, act quickly at the close of your auctions. Contact the winner, and congratulate them. Describe the item they have won and how the item will be shipped – even if this information is already part of the description for the auction. Remind them of their winning bid amount, and give them payment options and instructions. Let them know when the item will be shipped.

Close your email by thanking them for participating in your auction. You might even take this opportunity to tell them about other open auctions that you have as well. Think of this contact with the winner as a conversation that you are having with a customer who is standing at your counter in that imaginary brick and mortar store.

Once the payment and shipping details have been taken care of, contact your buyer again. Let them know when the item was shipped – the exact date and time – and when it is expected to arrive on their end. During this contact, let them know that if they have any problems or questions, that they should contact you through the eBay site. If they do contact you in the future, make sure that you answer promptly, and that you do all that you can to make them happy with their purchase – even if it means issuing a refund.

Yes. You should be open to issuing refunds, depending on what the item is. Furthermore, you should issue refunds promptly. Of course, it is reasonable to expect the buyer to return the item to you, at your expense, before the refund is issued – but once you receive the item, issue the refund promptly. This is just good business!

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.

Tips for Selling Collectibles on eBay.

Yes, collectibles! Collectibles are where eBay started, and they’re still one of its biggest areas – however much they might want you to believe they’re not. eBay’s most hardcore and long-time users are almost all collectors of something or other – it is quite common to post what you think is a mundane item, only to have collectors suddenly go to war over it because it is somehow linked to something they collect.

Collectors are the people on eBay who really do pay top-dollar for things that seem like junk to you and I – not to mention to the people you’ll be getting your stock from! That’s why you can make so much profit on collectibles. Here are a few tips.

Go to people’s homes. People’s homes are full of things that someone out there collects – they are the best and cheapest source of collectibles out there. Sure, you might find something if you hang around at enough garage sales, but you’d have competition. Getting invited to people’s homes to look around should be a dream for you, and one you’re doing your best to make a reality.

Buy on other auction sites. You’ll be surprised how much money you can make if you buy the collectibles that people sell on smaller auction sites like Yahoo Auctions, and then list it on eBay. These sellers will often be perfectly knowledgeable about their item, but simply getting a lower price because they serve a smaller marketplace. Sometimes you can almost double your money.

List in non-collectible categories. If your collectible doesn’t have a category of its own under ‘collectibles’, you might prefer to list it in a category that has something to do with the item but nothing to do with collecting. What you will often find is that people browsing a category for their favourite thing will pay more for your collectible than actual collectors would.

Do lots of research. Never list something you think might be valuable without searching and searching to dig up every piece of information you can on it. Everything you find out is likely to be useful when you come to list it.

List every tiny, tiny detail. Remember that collectors really care about the most seemingly insignificant things. An item from one year can be worth thousands while the one from the year before is near-worthless, or an item that is one shade of a colour can be worth far more than one of a subtly different shade. It’s not worth puzzling over and it’s not worth trying to pass your items off as something they’re not – just make sure you put absolutely everything you know in the description.

When you are listing items that require close research and description down to the tiniest detail, however, don’t be tempted to steal someone else’s work! Whatever you do, don’t take another seller’s description and try to pass it off as your own, as this could have all sorts of consequences for you. Our next email gives you a guide to eBay’s policy on ‘description theft’.

Ebay And Paypal

E-Bay and Paypal are two giant firms which are involved in sales transactions of customers. E-Bay is an online portal in which buyers could auction and bid items for sale. On the other hand, Paypal is the most popular online payment system used through credit cards. The teaming up of both firms is inevitable because E-Bay provides the goods to be purchased while PayPal provides the resources to be used.

E-Bay has indeed grown as the number one destination of online shopping through auctions. E-Bay offers a variety of choices when it comes to books, food, gadget, technology stuff, and many others. The variety and diversity of E-Bay makes it the most visited site whenever buyers are thinking of something to purchase. It is also a favorite destination for online shoppers who want to have a quality bargain of the items they want to buy. On the other hand, Paypal is the most reliable online payment system utilized whenever holding transactions. The firm claims that they have 16 million users worldwide. Despite of such successes for both firms, there are still many criticisms regarding the nature of both businesses.

E-Bay is often criticized as a portal that is not pro-buyers instead, it some people consider it as pro-sellers. Some buyers accuse E-Bay as not being true to their business and does not really live up to their word. On the other hand, Paypal does not really receive a lot of complaints but when it does, no one seems to mind. This is because their customer service department does not do their job well. No one really assists the customers and when they reply, it seems like the customer waited for 20 years before an action was done.

Due to the partnership of these two companies, many speculated that E-Bay would acquire Paypal. Many people were not in agreement to this deal because they believe that once E-Bay had acquired Paypal, the rotten service of the firm would eventually be more than worst. Aside from that, competition would also diminish in the market. Despite the said speculations, both firms deny that a joint venture or acquisition between the two companies would happen. Both firms insist that they would continue each other’s operations separately and not as a joint company. Both firms also expressed that their partnership between each other is solid but not to the point of collaborating with each other.