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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Your reputation as a buyer (or ‘feedback rating’) is the most important thing people see when they deal with you on eBay.
It is on the basis of this little number that they will decide whether they can trust you or not.
Each time you buy or sell something on eBay, people can leave feedback for you, and you can leave feedback for them. This feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral, along with a comment. Your feedback rating, then, is worked out using a very simple summary: the numbers of positive feedback comments people have left for you, minus the number of negative ones. This means that someone with a feedback rating of 28, for example, might have 30 positive ratings and 2 negative ones.
If you are a considerate buyer, then you should find that positive feedback will just appear next to your username, without you needing to do anything. If you want to help it along, though, there are a few things you can do.
Always leave feedback for others: People will feel an obligation to leave feedback for you if you leave it for them (eBay will send you an email after each transaction to offer you the opportunity). Take the time to write a positive comment about sellers who do what they should and the chances are they will do the same for you.
Pay promptly
Sellers love nothing more than to be paid promptly – paying as soon as the auction ends saves the seller all sorts of worry, especially if you pay by credit card or another electronic method. You will often find that your positive feedback appears within a few minutes of you paying if you pay as soon as the auction ends.
Don’t be a difficult customer
Understand that your seller might take a day or so to respond to you, and perhaps a few days to send your item – harassing them is nasty and unnecessary, and won’t get you good feedback.
Build relationships
If a seller sells a lot of a certain kind of thing you like, buy from them a few more times. They will be very happy to find a regular customer, and will go out of their way to leave positive feedback like ‘a joy to deal with as ever’. Also, they might offer you a few special deals!
Sellers will not generally be reluctant to sell to buyers without much of a reputation, simply because it is the buyer who takes most of the risk in a transaction. It is worth remembering, however, that transactions where you are the seller and where you are the buyer are counted towards the same feedback total – so if you ever want to start selling, being a good buyer is especially worthwhile.
On eBay, people pay far more attention to sellers’ ratings than they do to buyers’ – most sellers cannot be bothered to check their buyers’ feedback, while bad feedback on a seller can (and should) be a dealbreaker. When you are buying, then you need to worry more about the seller’s reputation than you do about your own, and that is why the next email will be all about sellers’ feedback ratings.
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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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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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Most of the people who make money from eBay do not actually make all of that money on eBay. There are all sorts of ways you can use eBay to give your existing businesses a helping hand.
The Supply Side.
If you have any leftover stock or used items from another business you run, then why not sell them on eBay? You can make this a regular thing, using it to get rid of things that will not sell for the premium you ask for in a shop, or items that are no longer in demand in the town or city where your business is based.
You can really make a lot of money this way, if you know what you are doing. Of course, you will already have to be an expert in the items you are about to sell, as you use them in your business, and you do know that the items are of high enough quality to be sellable. This is a whole new market for your old inventory!
However, it is not only the selling aspect. Bear in mind that your good eBay reputation will make you a great buyer! If there is ever anything you want to get for your business, the chances are you will be able to get it on eBay for a discount.
The Sales Side.
Here is where the true power of eBay lies. eBay give you an ‘About Me’ page, where you can write anything you like and link anywhere you like. This means that you can get traffic to your business’ website by linking to your website from your About Me page and linking to your About Me page from each auction.
To create an About Me page, just click on ‘Community’ on the toolbar, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click ‘Create an About Me page’. You then get the option to either enter your own HTML or let eBay guide you through the process. All you need to do is write a little about your website, link to it, and you are done. You will notice that more people start to come to your site straight away.
There are thousands of people who swear by this technique to drive traffic from eBay to their website. With a little persuasive sales copy on your site, they say, you can sell directly to buyers, cutting out the eBay middleman. Additionally, all the traffic you will get will be targeted, as the people who click through were interested in your auction to begin with.
This can be a really powerful technique, even for affiliate marketers, especially if you have already got an e-commerce site. Even if you have not got one, you might find it worthwhile to set up a website that does nothing but list your eBay inventory with a few dollars off each item, with a PayPal ‘Buy Now’ button for each item. Then simply make the link to your About Me page read ‘Visit my website for even more bargains!’, and you are done.
Now that you have seen how to drive visitors to your website, maybe you would like a little help getting your auction in front of buyers.
The next posting will show you the secrets of taming the eBay search engine.
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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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After all, you have decided that you want to get started as a seller on eBay. However, there are a few things that you really need to know before you go and throw yourself in at the deep end.
What to Sell
First off, you need to know what it is you are going to sell. What is your speciality? You will do far better on eBay, if you ate to become a great source for certain kinds of products, as people who are interested in those products are likely to come back to you again and again. You will not get any loyalty or real reputation for quality if you just sell rubbish at random.
When paying some thoughts on what you want to sell, there are a few things to consider. The most important of these is always to sell what you have knowledge about. If you are trying to sell something that you just do not know anything about then you will never be able to write a good description and sell it for a good price.
You might think you are not especially interested in anything, but if you think about what kind of things you usually buy and which websites you most frequently visit. I am confident that you will discover that you indeed have some kind of interest in a lot of matters. If everything fails, mention it to your friends and family. They will almost certainly say “Oh, well why don’t you sell…”, and you are going to slap your forehead, thinking how stupid you are.
From the things you know enough about, you should consider which products you actually could get for an attractive price and resell for profit, and how suitable they would be for posting. If you can think of something that you possess knowledge about, being small and light enough for postage to be relatively cheap, then that is great!
Do not worry if you think the product you are selling is too obscure. There is a market for almost everything on eBay, even things that would not sell once in a lifetime if you were to stock them in a shop will sell on eBay. You will probably do even better if you fill a niche than selling something common.
Tax and Legal Matters
If you earn more than just pocket money, you should be aware that you are going to have to start paying tax – this will not be done for you. If you decide to sell on eBay on a full-time basis, you should probably register as a business.
Prepare Yourself
There are going to be ups and downs when you sell on eBay. Do not panic if something goes wrong with your first few sales.
Sellers who are successful on eBay are the ones who enjoy it, and stick to it whatever happens.
Anyone can sell on eBay, if they believe in themselves, and if you do decide eBay is not for you, the start-up costs are so low that you will not really have lost anything.
If you are ready to start selling, then the next thing you need to know are what different auction types there are, this in order to decide which ones you will use to sell your items. In the next posting, some guidelines will be outlined.
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Christer
BTW
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My new content from all my web pages is also going there
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