eBay Lesson – How to Check an eBay Seller’s Reputation and Why You Should Do It
When you buy something from an eBay seller, you are giving them your money and hoping that you will get something in return.
However many guarantees of safety eBay might make to you, nothing is certain. If you just give your money to scammers all the time without doing any checks then the chances are you will not get all of that money back.
That is the reason why you should always check the seller’s reputation, or ‘feedback rating’. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise that risk.
How to Check Feedback Ratings.
On each item’s description page, there is a box in the top-right hand corner about the seller, with the title ‘Seller information’. This contains the seller’s name, their feedback score, and their positive feedback percentage, as well as any stars they have earned.
Different coloured stars are given to eBay sellers depending on their rating, in this sequence: yellow, blue, turquoise, purple, red, green, shooting yellow, shooting turquoise, shooting purple, shooting red. Anyone with a ’shooting’ star is an experienced eBay member who you should be able to trust.
If you click on the seller’s name, you can get to a more detailed view of their reputation – their ‘member profile’ page. This page shows the total number of people who gave them a positive or negative rating, as well as a breakdown by time. You can also see a complete history of all the comments that have ever been left about them, with the most recent first.
What to Look For.
You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be trusted, but that isn’t always true. It is more important to look at their positive feedback percentage – and you should really consider anything below 99% to be a red flag and investigate further.
Take a look through the first visible page with the most recent transactions: are there any negative comments? What do they say? Take others’ experiences into account, as they could happen to you if you deal with this person. Be careful not to punish sellers unfairly, however, if they did bad things in their past on eBay but have improved since. You should look at the breakdown by time and ignore any negative feedback that was left a long time ago. Equally, though, you should sit up and pay attention if a seller seems to have been left an out-of-character amount of bad feedback in the last month or so.
Now that you know who to trust, it is worth learning a little more about how the different kinds of auctions work, so that you do not accidentally slip up and make yourself and your feedback page look bad.
The next posting will be about the different kinds of auctions you can expect to encounter during your time on eBay.
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Christer
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Going full-time as an eBay seller is living your dream. Being able making a real income, working from home, being your own boss and all the rest of it. It is the promise of a million scams, and it has finally come true – at least for some.
However, what they do not tell you in the success stories, is that becoming a full-time eBay seller is by no means for everyone. You most definitely ought to try it part-time, before even considering taking it up full-time and even then, caution is advisable.
Before you burn your suit, below is 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 loose if you give up your job to focus on eBay. If you are in a well-paid job with good promotion prospects then it is worthwhile reconsidering. You might get a few years down the line and wish you would have stayed in your traditional job, as you would probably be the CEO by now.
Would I Really Make Much More Money?
Unless you are 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 or not, really depends on what kinds of items you are selling. For low value items, going full-time could be a good move. For high-value ones, the chances are you will hit the limits of how much money you have to invest in inventory long before you hit the limits on your time. (see also dropshipping below)
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 are 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 is the real test.
If you made it through all these questions, then I guess you are cut out for the eBay life – and even if you did not, you would be surprised just how far you can get part-time.
The next posting will show you how to make you think like the eBay elite – the PowerSellers.
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If you seriously thinking of earning, not losing BIG money on eBay, I definitely recommend a very successful product how to market eBay(R) auctions
eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches -
as a successful eBay Seller, you will need it!
Take Action – Click Here to Download “eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches”
* * * * *
Another viable and most recommendable option, when starting up an eBay business, is to make use of the drop shipping concept, which you can read about in the post – eBay and Drop shipping – What Is It All About?
Click here to find out more about drop shipping.
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Christer
BTW
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If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
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Is the eBay Customer Always Right?
The answer to this question is ‘yes’. In fact, the answer is a BIG fat ‘YES!‘, the biggest yes you have ever heard. Of the course the customer is always right. If you want to be a successful eBay seller, you should go miles out of your way to make sure every single one of your customers is 100% satisfied, no matter how much time or money it might cost you.
A dissatisfied customer will leave negative feedbacks, and negative feedbacks are to be avoided at all costs. That one piece of negative feedback will always cost you more than it would have to deal with the complaint, whatever the value of the items you sell might have been. You should consider any positive feedback percentage under 100% to be an absolute disaster, and a personal failure on your part.
But What If…
But nothing! There is no situation where you, as a seller, should get into any dispute with a buyer.
Below are a few common situations and how to handle them.
The customer says the item never arrived: Politely ask the buyer to wait a few more days to see if it turns up, and then email you again if it still has not arrived. If it still has not arrived, you should assume it was somehow lost in the post and offer him or her to send a replacement if you have one, otherwise give them a full refund. I quite frankly do not care what it will cost you. Are you serious about selling on eBay or not?
The item has been damaged in the post. You must offer to replace it or take it back for a refund without hesitation.
The customer says the item does not match the description. Resist the urge to email back with “yes it does, you just didn’t read the description properly”. Take the item back for a refund, and edit your description if you need to, to straighten out any confusing points in your description.
I am certain that you are starting to detect a pattern by now. Offering a refund will make almost any problem go away, and it really will cost you less in the long run. Remember, one piece of negative feedback will stay with you forever, whilst having a 100% positive rating is like owning a bar of solid gold.
You should always handle customers’ complaints before they complain to eBay. In fact, you should email them pre-emptively to ask if they have any. Going through the dispute process is time consuming, reflects badly on you and is downright unnecessary.
Are you still not convinced? Think this would only work with cheap items? Well, you see, the higher the price of the items you sell, the more your reputation is worth to you. Let us presume you were selling $10,000 worth of items each week, for example, and making a $1,000 profit per week overall. You might think that refunding one customer’s $1,000 purchase would be a tragedy, losing you your whole week’s profit.
However, it is far better to look at it form a different perspective. If you are not prepared to give that refund, then not only will you lose the next week’s profit, but you will probably lose the next few weeks’ profit as well. Now which option looks better?
I absolutely cannot emphasise enough the importance of really believing that the customer is always right. But trying to make excuses for complaints is not the only thing you have to give up on. There are a lot of pitfalls that you need to avoid unless you want to kill your business before it has even started properly.
In the next posting I will show you what it is all about
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Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
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If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
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Being a seller also brings a lot of responsibility, and sometimes you might feel like you are not doing everything you should be.
Below a simple checklist that 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 did not 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 many other items the same as or similar to yours are selling, and what prices they are being offered at. There is 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 is worthwhile taking the time to photograph your items, especially if you have a digital camera. If you get serious about eBay but do not yet own a camera, then you will probably have to invest in one at some point (preferably ASAP).
Are you emailing your sellers? It is worthwhile sending a brief email when transactions go through, saying 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.
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 is a good idea 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 has not been opened), then you should make sure these terms are also displayed.
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. By the way, 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 is the only foolproof way to protect your reputation. Of course, you might be wondering by now whether it is really worth all the hassle to get a good reputation on eBay. Will not people buy from you anyway, and could you not just open a new account if it really comes down to that?
The next posting will set that straight.
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If you seriously thinking of earning, not losing BIG money on eBay, I definitely recommend a very successful product how to market eBay(R) auctions
eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches -
as a successful eBay Seller, you will need it!
Take Action – Click Here to Download “eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
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It is surprisingly simple to get started posting your very first auction on eBay.
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Below, the steps what you need to do.
Step 1: Open an eBay seller’s account.
If you have bought items 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 have never used eBay before, then you will have 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 reasons, this may involve giving your eBay card details and bank information.
Step 2: Decide what to sell.
For your first little experiment with eBay, it does not really matter what you sell. Take a look around the room where you are. I am confident there is something in there that you are 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 are on your way to listing your item.
The first thing you need to do is choose a category. The best way is just to 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 would not have done it, 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 have taken a picture, add it now as items with pictures always tend to 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 are done!
Step 4: Wait for your item 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 does not 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 have received 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 are finally done!
I hope you enjoyed selling your first item. Now that you are starting to get into it, the next posting will give you a checklist of things you need to do to become a successful seller.
* * * * *
If you seriously thinking of earning, not losing BIG money on eBay, I definitely recommend a very successful product how to market eBay(R) auctions
- eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches -
as a successful eBay Seller, you will need it!
Take Action – Click Here to Download “eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
My new content from all my web pages is also going there
If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
http://twitter.com/christerfolke