Friggin' Idiot's Guide to Buying and Selling on eBay by Chad Wyatt - HTML preview

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What Can I Do With the Flyers?

Well, there are all sorts of uses for promotional flyers.

While you could go and hand them out on the street, that probably wouldn’t be especially effective. Most of the people who walk past you and take the flyer will have no interest in your product, and it’ll just be a waste of paper, ink and time. No, as with all marketing, there are better ways to target your flyers.

Put them in envelopes: if you’ve been putting business cards or compliment slips in your envelopes, use the flyers instead. It’s like sending out a mini-catalogue to your buyers, and including the right items on it might help you make a few backend sales.

In your shop: If you have a real shop or business, then you can hand flyers out to your customers to let them know that you also sell things on eBay.

At a rival’s shop: This is a bit of guerrilla marketing, but maybe you’re into that. You can try handing your flyers out outside a shop that sells your items. Be aware that this might get the shop’s owners a little upset if they see you, however – you should only give flyers to people leaving the shop, not entering it.

Send them to businesses: Look up the addresses of businesses in the area that might need what you’re selling, and send them flyers in the post.

Flyers give you another advantage: If someone types your store’s address as it appears on the flyer and then buys something, then you’ll get the 75% final value fee credit for advertising, without even having to pay anything for advertising!

Users who are inexperienced on eBay, though, can create a few problems for you – they might not quite know what they’re doing, and that’s never good. In the next email, we’ll cover how to report and handle eBay transaction problems. How to Report and Handle eBay Transaction Problems.

Even when there aren’t any disputes, you might run into a few transaction problems on eBay – glitches that aren’t really anyone’s fault, but are just the result of a technical malfunction or another situation beyond the buyer or seller’s control. The number one cause of problems like this is email.

Email Problems.

 

If you use the Internet a lot, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the problems eBay can cause, and many buyers and sellers are relying on email to keep them informed about their transactions.

Sometimes, you might find that your emails to a seller bounce –you might have the wrong email address, or there could be a problem with their email. This happens especially often when buyers have free webmail accounts at places like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

When this happens, the buyer might not know you’re trying to contact them. Consider it urgent to contact them in the real world, before they leave you bad feedback. To find out someone’s real-world contact details, follow these steps: Click ‘Advanced Search’ near the top of your eBay screen, then ‘Find Contact Information’ in the menu on the left (under the ‘Members’ heading). All you need to do then is enter the other users’ eBay ID and the item number of what they bought.

You might find that the address you end up getting doesn’t exist, and the phone number seems to be disconnected, or wrong. However, if you didn’t get any working contact information for the buyer, then this means they’ve violated eBay’s contact information policy. You can report them at http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/identity-false.html, and nothing that they do from then on will reflect badly on you.

Be patient, though: Don’t send masses of angry emails to someone’s account: for all you know, they might be having problems with their computer or their Internet connection. Try phoning, and try waiting a while for a response.

PayPal problems.

You might also find that you have problems with people who aren’t quite sure how PayPal works. For example, they might try to send you money directly and send the wrong amount – this means that you need to refund any overpayment and get them to pay underpayment. If your buyer is reasonable, though, this should be an easy enough problem to solve – remember that they’re hardly going to refuse to pay the right amount when you’ve already got some of their money!