Monday, November 27, 2006

Is The Ebay Customer Always Right?

I can answer this question for you right now: the answer is ‘yes’. In fact, the answer is ‘YES!’ – the biggest yes you’ve 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, however much time or money it might cost you.

A dissatisfied customer will leave negative feedback, and negative feedback is 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. 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. Here are a few common situations and how to handle them.

They say 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 hasn’t arrived. If it still hasn’t arrived, you should assume it was lost in the post somehow and offer to send a replacement if you have one, or give them a full refund otherwise. No, I don’t care what that costs 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.

They say the item doesn’t 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 make any confusing points extra clear.

I’m sure you’re spotting 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, while 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’s say 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. It’s far better to look at it this way: if you don’t give that refund, then not only will you lose the next week’s profit, but you’ll probably lose a few weeks’ profit after that too. Now which option looks better?

I absolutely can’t emphasise enough the importance of really believing that the customer is always right. But trying to make excuses for complaints isn’t the only thing you need to avoid. There are a lot of pitfalls that you need to avoid if you don’t want to kill your business before it’s even started properly – and I’ll show you in the next email what they are.

Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit http://www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.

Source: www.Submitcontent.com


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Saturday, November 18, 2006

How To Get eBay Coupons.

You have to be very lucky to be one of the chosen few who receive an eBay coupon by email. These coupons are just like cash that you can use towards anything you buy on eBay – the only conditions being that you pay using PayPal, and that you are using eBay in the USA, Canada or the UK.

There are two ways to get eBay coupons.

Wait for that Email.

Of course, if you just wait, you’ll be waiting for a long time. You have to do something to make yourself look like the kind of person eBay would want to tempt back with a coupon. If you open an account, buy a few medium-value things and then suddenly stop, the chances are you’ll find yourself with some kind of special offer – but still, not always.

Go Searching.

The better way, of course, is to go and find the coupons that are out there on the web. This is quite hit-and-miss, as eBay don’t always have an offer on, but when there’s a valid code you can guarantee that it’ll be everywhere within a few hours. Just type ‘ebay coupon codes’ into your favourite search engine, but be prepared to pick through some rubbish. You might find you have better luck if you use a more obscure search engine, where people haven’t taken the trouble to game the results.

If going through search engines is too much for you, then just keep an eye out at any community forums you frequent, where someone might just post one. You probably have the best chances if you make a few friends on eBay’s own forums at http://hub.ebay.com/community. It can be fun and educational to chat to the regulars there too, so you really have nothing to lose.

How do You Redeem Coupons?

A coupon is basically a code, with some being quite long. All you need to do is pay with PayPal as usual for the item you want to use the coupon towards. After you choose PayPal as your payment method, you will notice a heading that says ‘Coupons, Gift Certificates and eBay Anything Points’. Type the coupon code in here: they can be long, so you should use copy-and-paste to make sure you get it right. Just click ‘Redeem’, and it’s good to go.

Don’t worry about causing problems for sellers by doing this, by the way – they have no way of even telling that you used a coupon, as eBay just pay them for the item as usual. Coupons are good for sellers as they attract more buyers to eBay, meaning that they get more bids on their auctions. After all, why would they object to getting more money without you actually having to pay it?

Since you’re interested in making your eBay shopping more affordable, you might be interested to know that you can now buy eBay items on credit. Our next email will tell you all the details of eBay’s new ‘Buyer’s Credit’ program.

Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit http://www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.

Source: www.Submitcontent.com

Ebay Feedback And What It's All About

The eBay feedback system is designed to give both sellers and buyers confidence in the transaction process. It's a good practice to have an idea of whom you are buying from on eBay and sellers need to know what kind of buyer you are. Trustworthiness will always be an issue with online auctions, after all, you have no idea of whom you are dealing with.

Good thing though, eBay has a system in place that enables both buyers and sellers to have an idea about the trustworthiness of who they are dealing with. It's called the feedback system.

EBay allows buyers and sellers to leave feedback for each other. The feedback system is designed to give buyers and sellers an idea of the ethical buying and selling behaviour of eBay members.

There are three types of eBay feedback and these are Positive, Neutral and Negative feedbacks.

Positive feedback is left for members who conduct themselves well, during and after transactions. A positive feedback adds one point to a member’s feedback profile.

Neutral feedback can be used to post comments about members when you are not overly satisfied but not disappointed. Before you consider leaving a neutral feedback, contact the member involved, often differences can be mutually sorted out and neutral feedback can become positive feedback for both members. A neutral feedback does not affect a member’s feedback profile.

Negative feedback is the main reason unscrupulous buyers and sellers are soon found out on eBay. Negative feedback comments are red flag warnings that alert future buyers and sellers that a member has demonstrated a total lack of responsible behaviour in previous transactions. A negative feedback counts as a - 1 and this is deducted from your feedback profile.

To view a seller’s feedback, click on their name or the link labelled Read feedback comments, you will find these under seller information.

Copyright © David Nettey

David Nettey is the webmaster of http://www.sourceneeds.com and http://www.LyecryNet.com, websites dedicated to http://www.pluginprofitssite.net">starting an Internet Home Business and http://www.LearnToCreateWealthOnline.com">How To Create Wealth Online.

Source: www.Submitcontent.com

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Dropshipping With Ebay Work From Home

How Dropshipping works with eBay By Joe Richey SwapSellTrade.Com

Dropshipping is a term used in reference to a type of retail sales, where the retailer does not keep goods for sale in stock. The retailer is in charge of passing the customer's order with their shipment details to a wholesaler, dropshipper or third party provider, who dispatches the goods requested by the customer directly.

Retailers using this sales model make their profit on the difference between the wholesale and the retail prices handled. Because the goods are not in stock, many retailers have purchased some of those items to be displayed at their land-based stores, allowing their customers to inspect the items, which are similar to those that they can purchase by placing an order.

Many retailers can receive from wholesalers and dropshippers different catalogs to increase the number of goods on sale without actually investing in any of those items, although some catalogs are not for free, but always cheaper than buying merchandise to display for customers. Dropshipping on the Internet is a virtual matter involving digital images of goods a retailer is selling.

On the Internet, retailers can upload the description of the goods for sale along with pictures and other information. This is made through the retailers' personal or commercial website, or listing the products at an auction site, such as eBay, where the potential buyers are waiting to bid.

Because dropshipping, is a method of selling and distributing goods that the retailer does not have in stock, the listings usually include pictures and information that are available to sales catalogs.

Manufacturers of goods and distributors are not one in the same. Hence, dropshippers are distributors that just receive the order from the retailer and send the items directly to the end user on the retailer’s behalf. Therefore, dropshipping involves 3 persons in the selling process: the dropshipper, the retailer and the end user, usually targeted at auction sites.

eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) is a successful online auction and shopping website, founded in September 1995, where people from all around the world buy and sell goods and services. Ebay is the leading online marketplace for selling physical and virtual goods, services and second-hand products, and collectibles from a diverse community of both businesses and individuals.

It is estimated that the eBay community is comprised of around 46.1 million registered users in different countries, speaking different tongues, eBay is the most popular shopping site on the web, thus the most frequently associated with dropshipping activities because of the nature of the Internet.

Online it is not necessary to have a stock of physical goods for sale, and many items sold are digital goods, easily processed without needing to be on stock.

Retailers at eBay usually sell small quantities of their products to other users registered at eBay's website. Whether physical or digital, sometimes those goods are also available through a land-based store or listed at personal web pages or e-commerce sites owned by retailers.

Dropshipping is a common practice that occurs when retailers receive a single large order for a product, and rather than route the shipment of those goods through their store, the retailers arrange for the goods to be shipped directly from the wholesaler (the dropshipper) to the purchaser.

eBay retailers sell millions of collectibles, equipment, furniture, computers, appliances, vehicles, and many other miscellaneous items, which are listed, sold and bought everyday.

Because there is no limit to the number of listed items at eBay, a retailer can list a single book and make available 50 units. These units are not in the seller’s stock, but available to be delivered in any quantity to the final end user after arranging for the delivery with the dropshipper to the final user.

Dropshippers are wholesalers, whether individuals or companies, selling large quantities of goods and merchandise to commercial, industrial, institutional, or other professional business users, or individuals acting as agents or brokers in buying or selling merchandise for others. Thus, it is more likely that goods listed by a retailer can be purchased from them at any time, while in stock.

At eBay, dropshipping works as long as retailer can purchase the goods on sale from the wholesalers. However, there are rare and valuable items that can hardly be found as unique items. If an end user wants to buy one of those rare goods, he/she must be aware if the retailers are listing a large number of them, because users will be purchasing all items with the risk of fraud. If they have, more than one of these rare items for sale, then how rare is the item.

Although, almost anything can be sold at eBay, the listed goods must not be illegal nor violate the internal prohibited and restricted policy. Listing fraudulent items or those misleading the buyer is absolutely forbidden. From physical and digital goods to services and intangibles, eBay is the super trampoline for retailer sales.

Dropshippers and retailers work hand in hand to sell at eBay. Retailers are only know as sellers, who usually bid on an item marked as new, with the goal in mind to ship the item directly from the dropshipper to the highest bidder. The seller's profits come from the difference between the winning bid and the wholesale price offered by the dropshipper, minus the selling fees from eBay.

In another modality or dropshipping practice, a retailer can use private freight carriers to transport large volume of goods. These items are delivered from the manufacturer directly to a postal office closer to the location where the end recipients live, instead of deliver the selling orders directly to the dropshipper, with the purpose to save time and postal costs.

Whichever the modality, eBay has been involved in controversy, ranging from such dropshipping activities to privacy policy violations, and the well-known seller fraud. However, eBay has provided information showing that only less than .01% of all the site's transactions result in a confirmed case of fraud.

In some of them, eBays argues that some of those complaints are related to end users discovering that they have purchased an item from a wholesaler and not from a retailer, filling a claim because of the difference of prices, or due to a very few other deceptive practices.

Dropshippers offer wholesaler prices indeed, but retailers do not. The difference between a wholesaler price and the eBay's listing price is the retailer’s profit. This cannot be considered defrauding the users, however they are just lying a little bit when they say they have the goods in stock that they actually do not have, and do not send from their own location.

Genuine wholesale prices are never shown to the public by resellers, but can be found if the end user has seen the item elsewhere and investigate. The best way to determine if drop shippers are legitimate wholesale suppliers is by paying attention to their tax identification number, which is required within the dealer application. Otherwise, established dropshippers with wholesaler activities require either a Social Security number or a Federal Tax ID (EIN).

Furthermore, authentic dropshippers will never require membership fees to access their services, so they will never offer full or partial refunds after a certain number of inventory purchases are made. Manufacturers, wholesalers, dropshippers, retailers and sellers are often mistakenly confused because of their selling activity, but all of them use different practices aimed at different clientele.

Depending on the management, dropshipping profits can be immense for retailers, but as sellers, retailers have to rely on the professionalism and goodwill of the dropshipper, particularly when all the deals and businesses with them are made via the Internet. On this basis, there is always a risk to get a wrong item supplying a faulty product, or when the dropshipper downright sends an incorrect one.

At eBay, the seller's reputation is affected for the good or bad dropshipping practices, because to the end buyer it does not make a difference whether the seller is a retailer or not. Buyers want to receive the goods that they paid for, and they want to receive exactly what is listed, and not a similar product with the excuse of that the original is "out of stock".

Due to a fraud prevention mechanism implemented by eBay, users have a feedback system where they can submit their experiences after purchasing any merchandise, reflecting their un-satisfaction if their expectations were not fulfilled. As bidirectional feature, both the sellers and the buyers can submit feedback and rate one other.

The rating system is only available after every transaction is made. Buyers and sellers get a "positive", "negative" or "neutral" rating. They can leave a short comment or remark regarding a particular bid, for instance, when a buyer receives from a dropshipper a product, which is not exactly that, was listed by the retailer.

When buyers have problems with sellers or when they do not receive the goods listed, buyers can rate sellers negatively, usually leaving a comment to harm the sellers' reputation or to warn other users about their bad experience, and even submit a claim for fraud. The importance of the rating system at eBay is based on the fact that buyers can examine a seller's feedback history.

In fact, new users are always encouraged to verify the seller’s history as a buyers' protection practice. eBay's feedback system protects buyers and sellers, who can also reject a bid when a feedback rating is not enough for the seller's expectations.

Another problem when a seller is involved in dropshipping activities is that there is always a risk of getting dropshippers that already have too many sellers using their services. This can be discouraging, because the dreams of exceptional profits disappear when a considerable number of eBay's users, are selling the same goods and seeking the same opportunities to capitalize on below-retail prices offered by the dropshipper.

If the competition is high, the prices go down, reducing the planned profit margins, and the lower the profits and the less affordable the dropshipping activity. However, knowing the basics about dropshipping, many users feel attracted to becoming sellers and develop a retailer activity using the services of one or more dropshippers.

If you are considering this possibility, before doing anything, choose a product to sell. Deciding on a product is the first step towards any selling process. Many people fail at this point because the belief that using the services of a dropshipper, the items to sell are irrelevant, due to the fact that all items will be available at the wholesaler's stock instead of you own.

Although there are many factors to take into consideration when it comes to selecting your first dropshipping product, most retailers focus their attention on postal savings, selecting books, CD's or other easy to carry merchandise, while others consider small items can cut costs, but there are usually more competitors selling the same items.

Dropshipping can deliver to your customers from a needle to elaborated pieces of furniture, so think carefully when choosing a product.

Once you have determined what you want to sell, locate the distributor who will be in charge of dropshipping the merchandise for you to the end users. This is easily achieved by doing a research using Google or any other of the major search engines. However, there are special eBay Dropshipping tools created to help you find dropshippers in your area, nationwide or worldwide.

Thanks Joe Richey Copyrighted Article Belonging to SwapSellTrade.com

Joe Richey Online Wholesale Master Agent Since 2001 See our dedicated site for dropshipping tools http://www.ultimatedropshipsecrets.com

Source: www.Submitcontent.com

Monday, November 13, 2006

Tips And Tricks For Using eBay Search.

If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re looking for on eBay. Here are a few golden rules.

Be specific: If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Spell wrongly: It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings – the chances are that fewer people will find these items, and so they will be cheaper.

Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe your item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Use the categories: Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to just look at results in that category. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Don’t be afraid to browse: Once you’ve found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is – a few symbols here and there and it’ll work wonders for you.

Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

In this order: If you put words in quotes ("") then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert Rings”.

Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” –(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either word.

So once you’ve found your bargain item, bid for it and won it, what if it all goes wrong? Don’t worry – eBay has a thorough dispute resolution procedure, and we’ll cover it in some depth in the next article, so you’ll be prepared if the worst happens.

Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit http://www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.

Source: www.Submitcontent.com