When you buy things on eBay, you pay the seller before they send you anything. This means that you, as a buyer, are vulnerable to all sorts of problems. You might not get the items you have paid for, or they might be damaged or faulty.
Luckily, you have two very important rights when you buy on eBay.
The Right to Receive Your Item.
Maybe the seller never sent the item, or maybe it got lost in the post. Whatever happened, you paid for the item. If it does not arrive in the post as described, you have the right to a replacement or a refund, whether it is the seller’s fault or not.
The fact that you bought something on eBay does not mean that you do not have the exact same rights that you would have if you bought it in a shop (these rights are pretty much the same all over the world). Plus, under eBay’s rules, the seller is not allowed to change their mind about selling you the item: once the auction ends, it becomes a contract – you must buy and they must sell, or face eBay’s penalties.
The Right for Your Item to Be as Described in the Auction.
Sometimes sellers do not wrap items properly, and so they get broken. Occasionally they write descriptions that are misleading or just plain wrong to begin with, leaving out vital details that would have caused you to change your mind about buying. If this happens to you, you again have the right to a replacement or a refund.
So How Do I Use My Rights?
First, you should take it up with the seller as most will be responsive, and do not want to have their reputation damaged when an upset buyer leaves negative feedback for all their future buyers to see. If that does not work, report them to eBay.
While eBay does not have many people handling complaints, they do have a relatively effective set of automatic process to handle common problems buyers and sellers have with one another.
Finally, if that does not work, then you should seek advice from consumer groups in your country, and as a last resort from the police. However, you should never have to get this far. Problems on eBay that cannot be resolved easily are extremely rare.
Don’t Be Too Quick To Complain.
Remember not to get too annoyed and be unfair to the seller. Nice sellers have agreed to give me refunds for undelivered items, only for me to find out a few weeks later that they were being held for me at the post office! Always try your best to communicate and think of everything that might have gone wrong. eBay works best when buyers and sellers sort out their problems together, instead of reporting each other to the authorities straight away.
More often that not receiving what they paid for, buyers have an altogether different problem. T hey knew what they were paying for, but did not realise that what they were paying for was overpriced, low quality or a scam.
The next posting will give you a list of tips on how to avoid being ripped off on eBay.
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Christer
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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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Christer
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Your eBay reputation is everything you are on eBay. Without it, you are nothing. Your reputation is worth as much as every sale you will ever make.
If you have ever bought anything on eBay (and the chances are you have), then think about your own behaviour. Buying from a seller with a low feedback rating makes you feel a little nervous and insecure, while buying from a PowerSeller with their reputation in the thousands does not require much thought or fear. It feels just like buying from a shop.
A Bad Reputation Will Lose You Sales.
In fact, a bad reputation will make you loose you almost all your sales. If someone leaves you negative feedback, you will feel the pain straight away, as that rating will go right at the top of your user page for everyone to see. Who is going to want to do business with you when they have just read that you “took a month to deliver the item”, or that you had “bad communication and sent a damaged item”? The answer is, that no-one is prepared to do business with you.
Your next few items will need to be very cheap things, just to push that negative down the page. You might have to spend days or even weeks selling cheap stuff to get enough positive feedback to make anyone deal with you again.
It is even worse if you consistently let buyers leave negative feedback. Once you get below 90% positive ratings, you might as well be invisible.
You Cannot Just Open a New Account.
Besides eBay’s rules about only having one account, there are more downsides than just getting a new account. You literally have to start from scratch all over again.
You will not be able to use all the different eBay features. Your existing customers will not be able to find you any more. Your auctions will finish at a lower price because of your low feedback rating. Opening a new account is like moving to a new town to get away from a few people who are spreading rumours about you. It is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
A Good Reputation Will Get You Sales.
When PowerSellers tell me something, I tend to believe them. They can be selling a pretty unlikely item, but if they guarantee it is what they say it is, then I trust them. After all, they are not going to risk their reputation. This is the power of a reputation. People know you want to keep it, and they know you will go to almost any lengths to do so.
This is true even to the point that I would sooner buy something for $20 from a seller I know I can trust than for $15 from someone with average feedback. It is worth the extra money to make me feel like the seller knows what they are doing has all their systems in place and will get me the item quickly and efficiently.
You really will find selling on eBay so much easier, and there is only way to get a good reputation. Make sure you please your customers every time. However there are customers, which sometimes can be difficult to please.
In the next posting, we ask – is the eBay customer always right?
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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
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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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Many new sellers don’t fully realise how important pricing is when it comes to eBay auctions. Many don’t even realise that ‘pricing’ needs to be done. After all, eBay is an auction site! But eBay auctions are not quite the same as the auctions you attend in the offline world. In fact, quite a bit of work goes into determining and setting prices on eBay.
Essentially, there are only three prices that can beset for an eBay auction:
- the ‘buy it now’ price
- the reserve price
- the starting bid price.
Of these three, the starting bid price is the only one that is required for an eBay auction. The reserve price and the ‘buy it now’ price are optional. The starting bid
price is fairly simple – never set it higher than $50 or so – no matter what your item is really worth. This low opening price will get bidders to your auction.
Setting low starting bid prices creates the need for a reserve price. A reserve price is the absolute lowest price that you want to get for your item. You may sell the item below the reserve price, but you will not be required to. In other words, if you set your reserve price at $100, and your highest bid is only $50, you do not have to sell the item to the highest bidder. You can close the auction without any negative feedback or repercussions. Set your reserve price at the absolute lowest price you are willing to sell your item for. Keep what the item is worth, as well as what it cost you in mind.
The ‘buy it now’ option will allow you to set a price and buyers can buy the item immediately, without bidding, for that set price. This option can be used for any type of item, and it should be set to match your reserve, give or take a few dollars. This option is great if you have multiple identical items to sell.
Shipping has a price, and potential buyers take this into consideration when they are looking at an auction. If you can see your way clear to offer free shipping, you will find that people are placing more bids. Make sure that your potential buyers realise that you are offering free shipping!
Before setting any prices, you need to determine what the item is really worth. The value of the item in different markets might be quite high. However, you are selling on eBay and eBay is a different world altogether! Find out the price that similar items are sold for on eBay before setting any prices. If it is a collectable, or a high ticket item, have the item evaluated to ensure that you are not going to lose money!
* * * * *
If you seriously thinking of earning 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 – you will need it!
Take Action – Click Here to Download “eBay Fortune , The Definitive Roadmap To Auction Riches”
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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!
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