How to Increase Your eBay Backend Sales.

It shouldn’t too hard to increase your eBay backend sales – because the chances are you currently aren’t making any! Backend sales are sales to customers who have already bought an item, also known as ‘up-selling’. These are usually easier sales to make than normal sales: in sales-speak, your existing customers are ‘warm leads’.

It’s a technique you’ve probably noticed being used on you in shops: you buy something, and you’re offered a $5 piece of equipment to keep it clean, or make it easier to use. The usual human response is to say to yourself “heck, what’s another five dollars – it might be useful”. It’s just another five dollars to them, but they might have just added 20% to your profit margin.

Figure Out What Goes Together.

Out of the things you stock, which cheaper things are there that could be useful to someone who now owns one of the more expensive ones? For example, if you sell digital cameras, the backend product is digital camera memory – they never come with enough out of the box. The backend products for a printer would be ink and paper. Try to think laterally!

If you can’t think of anything, take a look around at the cheaper ‘extra’ items that your competitors offer, and see if you can find a supplier for them. There are very few product areas where this technique doesn’t apply.

Include Letters in Packages.

When you send items out in the post, include a brief sales letter with products you think might be of interest to the customer. It’s like sending out a personalised, targeted catalogue to your customers with every purchase. Again, you’ll find that a significant percentage of people won’t have bothered to look at what else you were selling, and will go back to buy a few more things.

To stop people from just putting such a letter aside and thinking they won’t do anything about it right now, you might like to include some kind of limited time offer – 10% off if you order within the next month, for example.

Email Your Customers.

Each time you sell something to a customer, you get valuable market information about them, and they get to see that they can trust you as a seller. That’s why backend sales are so powerful. Keep your customers updated in your newsletter, making sure you list any new products there that you might have in stock. The chances are that these customers will be far more eager to buy from you.

Consumable Products.

If the product that the customer bought from you to begin with is consumable (it will run out), then this is a special case. You shouldn’t try to make the backend sale straight away, but should instead wait long enough that the average customer would have just run out of the product. That’s the time to strike.

If you want to keep your buyers, then you need to provide good customer service. Our next email will show you exactly how to reduce eBay buyers’ complaints.

 

How to Reduce eBay Buyer Complaints.

Buyers are funny creatures, aren’t they? One minute they’re over the moon because they’ve got themselves a bargain, and the next they’re upset because their bargain seller doesn’t provide first-class customer service. There’s only really one way to reduce complaints: give these people what they want!

Post as soon as you can: The number one cause of eBay complaints are impatient or anxious buyers, who want to know when their item is going to turn up. If you get an order on Monday and wait until Saturday to post it, that’s bad customer service. Try to post items at least twice a week, to avoid making your buyers wait too long.

Make the description crystal clear: You need to make sure that your buyers know exactly what they’re buying, so they won’t be surprised when it turns up and isn’t exactly what they expect. Don’t be afraid to describe small defects in your description – it’s better to list it there than have buyers discover it for themselves later. If you get a lot of confusion about something, say it twice or even three times, and say it in a large font.

List all costs up-front: Don’t hide away your shipping costs if you think they’re too high – nothing will annoy buyers more than keeping costs secret until you expect them to be paid. If you really don’t want to display your shipping costs, just offer ‘free’ shipping and add the shipping costs to the item’s price.

Pack well: Spend as much as you need to on packing materials, and be careful with it. Remember that your item is going to have to travel through the post, and you want it to arrive in the condition it left. Wrap things securely in a few inches of a material like bubble wrap or stryofoam, and be sure to use a sturdy box. If you go around using boxes from the supermarket and old newspapers, expect things to break in the post.

Tell them to complain: This might sound a little counter-intuitive, but one of the best ways to stop your customers from complaining is to tell them to contact you if they have any complaints. Most people only complain if they feel a seller is unresponsive and confrontation – asking people to complain is more likely to get you shy and polite enquiries than complaints. You might not believe it now, but try it for a while and you’ll see your customer relations improve.

Respond to emails promptly: Check your email as often as you can, and never leave an email around to respond to later or tomorrow. Having to wait days to have their email answered upsets customers more than anything, especially if they’re already waiting for their item – it makes them feel stranded and powerless. Always respond to emails as soon as you can, and certainly within a maximum of 24 hours.

However much you might try to stop your buyers from complaining, though, someone will sooner or later.

 

How to Respond to an eBay Buyer’s Complaint.

 

At some point in your eBay selling life, one of your customers is going to send you a complaint. As long as you respond to it properly, however, it’s easy to keep a complaint from turning into a crisis.

 

Respond Immediately and Grovellingly.

 

Someone might complain to you directly, or they might do it through eBay. Whatever happens, you need to email them immediately. Here’s a template to use:

“I have just received your complaint and I would like to say that I am very sorry you aren’t satisfied. If you would like, I can send you a [replacement/refund] for the item, as part of my ‘no questions asked’ guarantee. I apologise again for our mistake.”

Whatever you do, don’t start making excuses for yourself. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t get around to posting it yet because I’ve been busy at work and I’m going on holiday next week…” – no-one cares. If the buyer isn’t satisfied, then you screwed up, and you need to apologise repeatedly and do everything you can to make them happy again. Besides, is it really worth your time to go through eBay’s long-winded dispute process when all it’s going to do is alienate your customers?

This an attitude that will give you a massive advantage in eBay selling, for the simple reason that many smaller sellers are confrontational, unhelpful and out for every penny they can get. If buyers are rude to you, it’s just because they’re used to dealing with rude sellers.

Responding politely, promptly and being willing to do anything for your buyers will mark you out as different. It’s so rare that you might even manage to turn your complaining buyer into one of your most loyal customers!

Let People Phone You.

Don’t insist that everything is done with email – allow frustrated buyers to phone you and have a chat about their item. The chances are that they will never have talked to a human voice before about an eBay complaint, and will be even more impressed with anything you offer them to solve their problem.

Neutralise Negative Feedback.

If it really comes down to it and your complaint ends up as a piece of negative feedback on your record, make sure you post a response – and don’t make it something like “buyer was impossible to work with, avoid”!

Instead, post an apology, and detail what you did to put things right, for example: “Very sorry for the scratched item, I have sent a replacement”. You may also find that some buyers leave feedback before you have the chance to put things right, in which case you could write a phone number in the response space, or something like “I have emailed you about a refund”.

This will let anyone looking through your feedback see that not only are negatives very rare, but the few that there might be aren’t really worth counting.

 

In the next email, you’ll learn how to turn your shipping costs into a profit center.

 

Turn Your eBay Shipping Costs into a Profit Center.

You might think that shipping costs are simple: surely you just add up the price of your item’s postage and the price of packing materials, and charge that – right? Well, you could do that, but there are better ways to make your shipping costs work for you.

Find Cheaper Materials.

The key to making profit on shipping is to use the cheapest materials you can get for packing, without compromising on quality. The great thing for you is that many eBay PowerSellers have made a business out of providing sellers with quality packing material in bulk at really low prices.

To get an idea of what’s out there, take a look at this category: Business & Industrial > Office, Printing & Shipping > Shipping & Packing Supplies. You might also try paying a visit to a big-box office supplies store.

Buy in Bulk.

Always buy hundreds of the same sized packing boxes at the same time. Since you should be selling the same items over and over again, you’ll need the same sized boxes each time. You will always be able to get discounts for bulk – if the place where you’re shopping won’t give you any, go somewhere else.

Streamline Your Packing.

Try to pack every time using the same amounts of the same materials in the same way, so that you don’t need to think about it too much. Have all the labels for the packages printed up in advance, and do the items in that order. The less time you spend on the packing, the more profit it is for you.

Round to the Next Dollar.

Let’s say you’re buying items for $2, and selling them for $4 + $1.50 shipping. Rounding the shipping to $2 would make you an extra 40 cents on each sale – considering you’re currently only making $2 profit, that’s a percentage profit increase of 25%!

You see, this extra money will be far more important to you than it is to the buyer, because it’s on the margin. For you, it’s extra profit for nothing, and for the buyer, it’s too small an amount to bother caring about. Everybody wins in this scenario.

The Ideal Price Point.

Find out what your rivals are charging for shipping, and try to just undercut them while still making a profit. If you managed to buy some cheaper materials, this shouldn’t be too hard for you – most of the sellers on eBay are buying envelopes and boxes one-by-one, which is a very expensive way to do things. If you work things out correctly, you should be able to offer shipping at a price point which makes your rivals look silly, and still be making a good profit on it!

If you’re running the kind of operation where shipping is a big concern, then the chances are that you’re listing a significant proportion of your items using ‘Buy it Now’, instead of going through all the trouble and uncertainty of using real auctions every time. But wait! Using ‘Buy it Now’ isn’t always the right thing to do. Our next email will give you a few tips on when to do it and when not to.

When NOT to Use “Buy Now”.

As you get more experienced on eBay, you might be tempted to use fixed price auctions, just so you can budget better. It’s often more reassuring to know that either you will make a small profit on an item instead of having to wait and see whether it makes a big profit or a big loss. However, you should be aware that there are some times when you really shouldn’t use ‘Buy it Now’.

In the Holiday Season.

The market goes absolutely crazy just before the holidays – and that’s why you shouldn’t list items using Buy it Now. Do you really want to wake up one morning and find that all your stock has been bought up, the current highest bidders on your rivals are bidding double what you just sold them for, and the people who bought your item have relisted it with a starting price higher than what they paid? Of course you don’t.

I would recommend that you stop listing anything as fixed price as soon as you get into December, unless you have a lot of accumulated stock that you want to get rid of for low prices.

 

When an Item is In-demand.

If an item is selling within a few hours each time you list it using Buy it Now, then you really ought to consider using a normal auction format instead. The chances are that the final price you’d get would be much higher than whatever you’re charging now.

When You Have the Only Item on the Market.

If you have a hard-to-find item that no-one else is currently selling, then it makes no sense to use Buy it Now. You’ll be surprised just how high buyers will go on things that are truly rare, and how upset they’ll be if someone snatches it away from them using Buy it Now. It’s only fair to give everyone a chance to pay you more and more money, isn’t it?

If Your Item Doesn’t Sell.

If you keep needing to relist your item because it consistently fails to sell, that might be the time to give up on listing it in the fixed price format. Buy it Now only works for things that people always want – traditional auctions involve them more with things that they wouldn’t usually buy. You might end up with a slightly lower price than you wanted in the end, but at least that bad item will be off your hands.

If No-one Ever Buys From You With It.

It’s simply not worth having a Buy it Now button on every one of your auctions if nobody ever touches the thing: it’s just sitting there, costing you money for each listing. When it comes down to it, Buy it Now is expensive, and you should only use it in auctions where you really think it will help the item to sell.

Now you might not have noticed, but there’s another ‘alternative’ auction format that often goes ignored: the multiple-item, or ‘Dutch’ auction. In the next email, I’ll show you how these auctions work, and explain why they could be good for your business.

How do Dutch Auctions Work on eBay?
A multiple-item (‘Dutch’) auction is an auction where more than one of the same item is being sold at once. There are two kinds of Dutch auctions.

Without Bidding.

The most common Dutch auctions are actually a combination of two auction types: they’re multiple-item fixed price auctions (Dutch Buy it Now auctions to you and me). This just means that you can offer more than one of an item at a time for a fixed price.

This is very powerful if you’re selling something small in large quantities. You can just say how many of the item you have, and the Buy it Now auction will stay there until its duration is up or all the items have been sold.

Buyers aren’t limited to only buying one item at a time, either: they can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them. If you’re selling small things loose, then this can be really great – instead of selling them in packs of 50, you can sell 24 to one person and 95 to the next. It lets buyers save money by buying exactly what they need, and it lets you offer them the flexibility to have as many or few of an item as they want.

With Bidding.

Dutch auctions can also be done by bidding, but the process is rather complicated. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. Let’s say there are 10 of an item for sale. Anne bids $5 each for 4, while Bob bids $4 for 6. Anne will get her 4 and Bob will get his 6, but they will both only pay $4.

Here’s another example. If there are 5 items for sale and Anne, Bob, Carol and Dean want to buy 2 each, then obviously someone is going to lose out. Whoever bid the lowest will only get one of the item. If Anne bid $5 each, Bob bid $4 each, Carol bid $3 each, and Dean bid $2 each, then Anne will get 2, Bob will get 2, Carol will get 1 and poor Dean gets nothing. So then: how much they pay for the items?

Starting to sound like a particularly evil math problem, isn’t it? The answer is that everyone will pay $3, as Carol’s bid was the lowest one that won anything. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don’t worry – everyone else does too! That’s why Dutch auctions with bidding are so rare.

In fact, even eBay's normal one-item auction format has all sorts of problems, not least of which is auction sniping. Snipers are buyers who come along at the last minute to bid a few cents more than the highest bidder and win the item. Your buyers will find this infuriating – and you’re the only one with any power to help them out by stopping it. The next email will show you what you can do.

How to Stop eBay Auction Sniping.

Every day, hapless bidders get beaten to the punch by auction snipers who jump in at the last minute. I know how annoying it can be, as I once had it happen to me three times in a row on the same item! The thing is that the only people who can help the poor bidders are us, the sellers.

The Problem.

Bidders will bid on an item and then wait for days until it finishes, only to have someone else outbid them at the last minute. In a traditional auction at a real auction house, this isn’t a problem at all, as the auction keeps going until everyone has bid as much as they want to, and the auctioneer double-checks with the classic phrase “going, going, gone”.

The problem on eBay is caused by the fixed length of time that eBay’s auctions last, and the fact that they aren’t extended significantly if someone places a new bid in the last few seconds of the auction. Imagine if a real auction house worked that way, letting people shout “50 cents more!” at the last second and win an item. It would simply be unfair, and many buyers think it’s unfair on eBay too.

The Solutions.
Until eBay decide to fix the problem (and by now it’s looking unlikely that they ever will), you’re the only one who can do anything for your buyers.

First off, you can encourage your buyers to use eBay’s proxy bidding system the way it was intended. The idea of the system is that they enter the maximum they’re willing to pay for an item and eBay places bids for them automatically up to that maximum. They’re not supposed to come back and bid an extra dollar every time they get outbid.

If your bidders are bidding high enough, then no sniper will even come along and beat them – because they will have set the maximum snipe level in their sniping software to less than the normal bidder’s maximum. Changing the way people use eBay is hard, though.

One alternative is to keep an eye on who’s bidding on your auction, and cancel bids from known snipers – but this requires you to be around right at the end of the auction to cancel their bids. You might also want to set your auction to end sometime when bidders will be around so that they can outbid snipers themselves. This is good business sense anyway – most of the bidding always takes place in the last few hours of an auction.

An easier way to thwart bid snipers is to offer ‘Second Chance’ sales to bidders who get outbid by a sniper at the last minute. This is good for you, and for them – they still get to buy the item they wanted, and you’ve just made two sales: one to the sniper and one to them.

Once you’ve sold your items, though, you might be upset to find that one of them gets returned for a refund. Our next email will show you how to turn these returns into profits!

 

How to Turn eBay Returns into Profits.

Don’t worry, getting items returned happens to everyone eventually. You can’t satisfy all of the people all of the time, and occasionally someone’s going to want to send something back to you. Turning returns into profits isn’t easy – but with a little determination, you can manage it.

Don’t refund shipping charges: If followed our advice and you’re now making a decent profit on your shipping charges by using cheaper materials, then you might still be able to come out ahead with returns. Just refund the charge of the items but not the shipping. I know sellers who make $1 profit on the sale and $2 profit on the shipping. If they get a returned item then they don’t really mind: they still get to keep two-thirds of their profit.

Charge a restocking fee: You’re perfectly within your rights to charge a restocking fee, and that’s nothing but profit for you. Bear in mind that this will get customers very annoyed, however.

Resell with a better description: Now that you know if there’s something wrong with the item, you can write a more honest description. Surprisingly enough, items can sometimes sell for more the second time around, simply because word has had time to spread that you were selling the item and there might be a few people looking out for another.

Take their packing materials: Inexperienced buyers will send back your items using all sorts of expensive luxury packing materials – take them and re-use them the next time you want to give a buyer an extra special service. Incidentally, this also applies when you buy things on eBay – you’ll find that you can save a lot on packing when you re-use every piece of packaging that comes your way. Make sure to take off any labels first, though.

You know what they want: Remember that every buyer who buys something from you and then returns it was at least interested in it. They’re a potential sales lead, and you should add them to your mailing list to follow up later – if you were nice to them when they returned the item, they might be willing to give you another chance.

Replace with a better model: Finally, if the buyer is returning the item for a replacement, then tell them that the only replacement you have in stock at the moment is a slightly more expensive model – but you’ll send it to them if they pay the extra. Again, more profit for you.

Of course, it’s up to you whether you want to use these techniques: you might think it’s more valuable to refund the shipping on returns as a gesture of goodwill, as part of your perfect customer service. I would tend to agree with you: your reputation is invaluable. If what you’re interested in is making as much profit as possible in the short term, then go right ahead – but remember that in the long-term you might be sacrificing some repeat business for the sake of a few dollars.

In the next email, we’ll look at the myths and magic of drop-shipping vendors, and what they can do for you.

 

The Myths and Magic of eBay Drop-shipping Vendors.

If you’ve never heard of drop shipping, then prepare to be impressed – it sounds like every eBay seller’s dream. With drop shipping, you don’t have to keep any stock at all. You simply list auctions for what your drop shipper sells, without actually seeing it yourself.

Each time something sells, you let them know, and they deliver it for you – directly to the customer. They’ll charge you a near-wholesale price for the item they delivered, you charge the customer whatever price you agreed, and then you pocket the difference as profit.

The Magic.

Just think of the sheer amount of trouble this takes out of eBay selling. You don’t have to find space in your house to keep your stock in, or money to buy it with. You don’t have to take any risk by buying things that might not sell. You don’t have to deal with suppliers. You don’t even have to pack or post the auctions yourself. Wow! Can you imagine how good this would be if you could pull it off?

But, as with all things in life, if it sounds too good to be true…

 

The Myths.

Drop-shippers don’t do deals with just anyone – any drop shipper who says they’ll take orders from unregistered businesses is likely to be a scammer. They might not send out anything at all to your customers, or you might send out very poor quality merchandise that they will then return to you for a refund.

Also, beware of companies that claim they will put you in contact with drop shippers for a fee – they are inevitably rip-offs. At the end of the day, the best way to find drop shipping companies is to contact them in the ‘real world’, not by typing ‘drop shipping’ into a search engine.

Doing it for Real.

If you want to make a profit with drop-shippers, be prepared for it to be quite a small one: you’re not going to make sales on eBay at a big mark-up from drop shipping prices. You will also have to accept that you can’t inspect stock before it gets sent out, and some of your descriptions might not be as good as they could be.

You should also be prepared for a few frustrating experiences with your drop shipper, as they might not share the same customer service values as you. The first time you’ll realise that they never sent something to one of your buyers is when you hear about it from the buyer a week later.

If you can accept all these things, though, and find a reputable drop shipper, then there’s money to be made. Good luck!

If you’d like to give up a little more profit and control over your eBay business to save the trouble of doing everything yourself, then you might be interested in eBay consignment centers. You can sell your items at an eBay consignment center by just leaving them there. Stay tuned to these emails for more.

How eBay Consignment Centers Work.

You might not ever have heard of eBay consignment centers – don’t worry, most people haven’t, as they’re a relatively new concept. The idea is that you drop off anything you want sold, and then the consignment center will sell it for you and share the profits.

You Can Sell at Consignment Centers.

 

Just find something to sell and take it to a consignment center – they’ll sell it for you on eBay, handling all the listing, description and shipping.

You do, however, give up some profit when you sell through a consignment center, not to mention losing all control over your auctions – and who’s to say that you couldn’t sell it better than they can? The chances are they will only give you a fraction of the item’s real value, to the point where you might as well have just taken it to the pawn shop.

You Can Be a Consignment Center.

A better option is to be a consignment center for the non-eBay-using public in your area. After you’ve been selling things on eBay for a while and you’ve told a few people about it, someday a friend will walk up to you and say “Hey, could you sell this on eBay for me?” Give it a try – if you like doing it, then why not start up your own consignment center business?

Put an ad like this in your local newspaper or anywhere else you think is appropriate:

“Create Space and Get Money For Doing It! How would you like someone to come and clean out the old stuff in your house that’s taking up all your space, and then give you cash for the lot? I am currently looking for things to sell on eBay and I can do this for you. Call me on [your number].”

Go round to a few people’s houses and take some things that you think are sellable, giving the items’ owners a sensible amount for them – not too much, since they don’t know how much they’re worth. It’s best to try to take things that are part of a set or collection, so you can sell lots of the same kinds of items. You’re in a strong position: why would they so no when you’re offering them money for things that, to them, are rubbish?

The only requirement to be successful with this is that you need to know what you’re doing, and be able to spot a high-value item when you see one, regardless of what it might be. It’s also worth opening a new account to sell items you get from other people. You can’t guarantee quality as well, and your regular account should only be used