Off site ads on your eBay listings
October 25, 2008
eBay have been increasing the number of off site ads, which is no real surprise as their 2008 Q3 investor earnings call revealed revenues from text and graphical adverts on eBay are up 127% from the same period last year.
There are ads everywhere on eBay now, from the eBay home page to search results pages, My eBay and on eBay tools such as Selling Manager Pro.
Click to embiggen
If you’ve ever received an email from a buyer saying “Sorry I’ve purchased it cheaper elsewhere so I don’t want yours now”, then you’ll know how frustrating an unpaid item is. From now on it’s just as likely to be because eBay sent them to a cheap off site ad, as it is that they’ve purchased at a lower cost from another eBay seller.
The ads displayed on the eBay home page or in My eBay are generic ads, which though annoying, don’t attempt to directly compete with sellers. The ads in search results and on sold listings are targeted to specifically compete with the products that you as a seller are offering.
A year ago eBay stated “With a high degree of confidence we can say that sponsored links are not harming our sellers business as a whole“. How many more ads can eBay place on the site, in ever more prominent positions, until that’s not the case and sellers businesses do start to suffer?
Replying to ‘Message from buyer’ on SMP invoices
July 25, 2008
Last week messages from buyers entered at checkout started to appear in SMP as highlighted notes. Now you have the ability to quickly respond with a note which is added to the SMP invoice.
When you click into the SMP Sales record to read the note beneath it is a free type text box where you can enter a message of up to 600 characters which will then appear on the individual buyers invoice above any standard messages you’ve added.
Just below the message box is an email link - if you need to contact the buyer more urgently than via the invoice enclosed with their parcel don’t rely on adding a note which they won’t see before receipt. Notes to buyers are however great for those times you want to highlight any extra service you’ve given.
Messages from buyers highlighted in SMP
July 22, 2008
Messages from buyers, entered at checkout, are at last being highlighted in Selling Manager Pro (SMP) with an eBay note. If a note is entered on the PayPal payment it will now appear on the SMP sales record with an eBay note to let sellers know that it’s there.
It’s worth noting that the notes are not displaying in My eBay: users who wish to ensure they’re informed of messages from buyers should consider upgrading to SMP which is free with a featured shop, or £4.99 per month as a stand-alone option.
SMP glitch stops Firefox printing
July 10, 2008
Sellers using Firefox may be having a problem printing off their packing slips at the moment: some sheets appear to be printing correctly, while others are showing just the seller’s logo and address, and still others are completely blank. The problem appears to occur with both versions 2 and 3 of the browser, but doesn’t happen with IE7. The problem has been reported to Support by many people including myself; if we get news of an estimated fix time, I’ll update this post.
Please remember to reuse or at least recycle the blank sheets: think of the trees 
How SMP nearly made me miss my plane
June 17, 2008
You know what it’s like when you’re packing to go away - there’s always something that needs doing at the last minute and for eBay sellers it’s normally to post one last item for a buyer.
That’s exactly the situation I found myself in yesterday, but it was exacerbated by SMP. My buyer sent an email regarding his purchase instead of using My Messages but the only reference to his purchase was the invoice number and he didn’t email from his eBay registered email address.
SMP is great in a lot of ways but but it’s impossible to search for an invoice number. What’s even worse is that SMP generates invoice numbers based on when you print them out, and if like most you print them when packing they’ll pretty much be in order paid rather than order sold.
Trying to find a sales record via the SMP invoice number is close to impossible. Searching by item number, buyer email, title, sales record, email address and even custom label are all possible - just not by invoice number.
Yesterday it took over 30 minutes to locate an order, a process that should have taken seconds. Not a delay I needed on the day I was flying out to eBay Live! Please eBay, make SMP searchable by invoice number!
Are you spamming your customers?
June 9, 2008
I’ve noticed recently that SMP is sending out duplicate automated emails to a large proportion of buyers, in particular the “Payment Received Notification” email.
You can easily check which emails have been sent by clicking the number against the customer record in the Emails Sent column of SMP sold items.
I’m crossing my fingers that buyers view too much communication better than not enough, or simply write the duplicated emails off to a glitch on their server, rather than ding me on DSRs.
So far I’ve had no complaints, but it’s one worth keeping a check to see just how many emails your customers are receiving.
How much communication is too much?
June 3, 2008
With eBay sellers paying ever more attention to their DSR scores, the question of communication has come up on more than one eBay forum recently. “I’m sending out every single email that SMP will let me send,” goes the complaint, “and I’ve still only got 4.6 for communication. What am I doing wrong?” Inevitably someone else responds “you’re sending out too many emails. When I buy, I mark the seller down if I get spammed.”
It’s true: one buyer’s “good communication” is another buyer’s “spam”. What’s a seller to do? I want to take a look at how seller emails - and in particular, automated systems - might be made to work more usefully for both buyers and sellers.
You can’t please all the people all the time
Inevitably, people’s wishes about email communication differ. eBay sellers when buying are generally at one extreme end of the spectrum: we’re mostly online all the time, we get a lot of email, a lot of spam, we know how the system works and largely we trust it: we’d rather have less email, and we’ll let you know if there’s a problem.
At the other end of the spectrum is the buyer who replies to your automatic “item dispatched” email demanding to know when you’re going to dispatch their item: this buyer needs their hand holding every step of the way, they’ll write and thank you for leaving them feedback and if their item takes more than a day to arrive, you’re going to know about it. Bless: we were all there once.
It would be possible, I suppose, to individually email your buyers based on their level of feedback and how experienced they look, so that brand new buyers got more email and hand-holding, and people who were sellers themselves just got told the essential “your item is in the post”. I don’t frankly have time to email each individual buyer myself, and I’ll leave it to someone else to design an automatic system that will do it for me (Eddie? 
). For now, I’m doing my best to make SMP’s automatic emails work as well as they can.
Making SMP’s automatic emails work for you
SMP offers five automatic emails you can send to buyers:
- winning bidder/BINner notification
- payment reminder (seller’s choice of how many days after the sale)
- payment received
- item dispatched
- feedback reminder (i.e. please leave it)
Sellers have the choice to use none, some or all of these.
Before we take a look at each email in detail, let’s remember the most important fact about eBay-related email: (most) buyers have seen it before. Buyers know when they’re getting an automated email; the single most useful thing a seller can do, therefore, is change the subject lines on those SMP-generated emails. Make them yours. Make them unique. That way, you stand a halfway decent chance that buyers are going to read them.
Winning Bidder Notification
If you normally sell multiple BIN items to one buyer, then turn this one off. Little is more annoying on eBay than a dozen copies of an email beginning “Good News!” for something I already know about. If you normally run auctions, there’s more reason to use the winning bidder notification, as your buyers may be away from the computer when the auction ends. But even so, eBay send out emails to winning bidders anyway; do you want to duplicate that?
You could use this email to encourage further sales. If you have a shop, remind buyers to take a look before they pay; mention your combined shipping policies to give them an incentive to do so. And edit eBay’s default for tone: make it more appropriate for your audience. Crafty ladies like friendly and personal; I suspect computer parts buyers don’t, so much.
Payment Reminder
eBay’s standard text for this email is - frankly - bizarre. It spends a lot of time telling the buyer what they’ve won, but does not contain a “pay now” button. I’d strip out all the garbage from this, and say very simply, you won this item, we haven’t got your payment yet, here’s a button to click to pay with PayPal (or a Nochex link or whatever you use), and if there’s a problem, please let us know.
I still have misgivings about having this email automated. There are too many buyers around at the moment with “problems with their PayPal accounts”, and the last thing I want to do is rile someone by reminding them to pay when they’ve already told me I’ll have to wait til Monday. So I’m keeping this email as a manually-generated one. If you’re a massively high-volume seller who can’t keep notes on who’s told you there’ll be a delay in payment, then do at least warn tardy buyers they may get automated reminders.
Payment Received
With 99% of my eBay payments coming through PayPal, I used to think this one was completely pointless: my buyers knew when they’d paid me, and PayPal told them anyway. But this email is a perfect example of how you can highjack eBay’s original intent and use it for your own purposes.
I now use “payment received” to give my buyers an idea of shipping times. I appreciate that for those who pay on Friday night, not hearing from me until Monday morning may be just too long to wait, and so they get an email saying “we’ll be shipping on the next working day; if it’s Friday today, that means Monday.”
Item Dispatched
This is the most important email. This is your opportunity to really control your buyers’ expectations.
Allow for postal delays: I say “your item should be with you in the next few days, but please allow a little longer because postal services are not always as speedy as we would like them to be”. It saves my buyers panicking quite as quickly; it saves me having to answer a few “where is it?” emails.
Let me know if there is a problem: I say “please contact me if there is a problem. I can resolve most things, but only if I know about them, so please don’t be shy”. You might want to go for a bit less touchy-feely, but this is the time to imprint on your buyers’ minds that if there is any problem, they should contact you, not just reach straight for the negative feedback.
Feedback Reminder
Until recently, I had never used this email and had strongly encouraged other sellers to turn it off too. Don’t tempt fate, right? But the times are achanging, and I think it could be useful for some people. The default message about “please leave us feedback” is too strong, because you might just get some feedback you didn’t bargain on. But again, highjacking eBay’s automation to say “we hope you’ve received your order safely by now and that you had a five-star service; please do let us know if there is a problem” could be a good move for many sellers.
Use the opportunity
The primary aim of all of these emails should be customer service: keeping your buyers informed and letting them know what to do if there is an issue. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use SMP’s emails as a further opportunity to promote your brand and encourage further sales.
You can include your Shop logo in SMP emails; this is a great way to start building customer loyalty to *you* rather than to eBay. You can also include your default cross-promotions so that your emails also showcase other items you’re selling.
Rather than being just the same old eBay default spam, even if they are automated, your email communications should be personal to your business, and useful to your buyers. Happy, well-informed buyers come back to shop with you again, and hopefully they give you 5/5 for communication.
Five tips to get great feedback
March 27, 2008
Feedback is the hottest topic on eBay. It always has been and probably always will be although recent changes have made it a more emotional subject than ever.
The big question though is how you approach it and for sellers there are two approaches - either to focus on feedback which tends to mean agonising over every buyer, fretting whether they’ll give you a 4 or 5 star rating, or to simply ignore it in favour of simply giving great service and leaving customers to rank you at will.
Recent changes have made feedback more important than ever and it’s time to change your approach regardless of how you’ve handled things in the past.
Leave feedback first
There really is no reason for sellers not to bite the bullet and leave feedback on payment or despatch. The old argument that “the transaction isn’t complete until the buyer receives the product” is no longer valid. As sellers soon won’t be able to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers your only choice is to leave a positive or not to leave feedback at all.
From talking to sellers anecdotal evidence suggests that sellers that leave feedback first are more likely to receive positive feedback and less likely to receive negatives. It appears by telling a buyer they were a good customer they’re more likely to rate you as good seller. Buyers appear more reluctant to leave poor feedback when they’ve already received a positive themselves.
Ask for good feedback in communications
Use communications as an opportunity to ask for good feedback. End of item emails, invoices, despatch notes, despatch email are all times when you can set buyer expectations for feedback.
Use phrases such as “We aim to receive 5/5 feedback, please contact us if we’ve not achieved this”. Let buyers know that you want five star ratings - the old adage if you don’t ask you don’t get definitely applies to feedback.
Turn off SMP feedback reminders
Many sellers have used feedback reminders asking buyers to leave feedback for transactions. I’ve always been a firm believer that this is counterproductive and can lead to worse feedback than if not used. I have known sellers send out reminders for all outstanding feedback who received negatives in return for the efforts. Sometimes it can be better to *not* receive feedback.
Feedback left within days of the item arriving will normally be better than feedback left several weeks later when the product is used, abused and possibly broken and disposed of. The excitement and pleasure of the transaction has gone, the later feedback is left the more likely it is to be pragmatic rather than effusive.
It should also be remembered that eBay have stepped up communications and send their own feedback reminders so there really is no need for sellers to do likewise.
Ship fast
I firmly believe that he single most important thing you can change, to receive better feedback, is to ship fast. The quicker you can get the product into the customers hands the more likely they are to leave great feedback, instant gratification goes a long way.
Give great service
Of course you already give fantastic service which you’re proud of, I know I do… but there will always be areas in which you can improve. Take an honest objective look at how you do business and look at your competitors, do test purchases from them and find out what they do better than you. Aim to incorporate the best practices you find from every seller you purchase from and of course avoid irking your customers with the aspects of their service which are not so good.
Giving great service is what buyers want, what eBay are encouraging, and what will ultimately determine how successful you are. There really is no secret - great service will result in great feedback, but the tips above could help along the way.
eBay’s secret messages
March 19, 2008
Are your buyers trying to tell you something? It’s entirely possible they are and that you know nothing about it. Powerseller Allan from TropicanaUK alerted us to a potentially disastrous problem for buyers and sellers alike. Buyers now have the facility to add notes to sellers on checkout. However, unless sellers know that these notes might exist, and do a lot of digging to find them, they may never see them.
Notes could be a useful feature. For changes of address or colour options or the perennial favourite “please wrap well and leave feedback”, there are lots of things buyers like to tell sellers on checkout. But if we don’t know what they’re saying, or even that they could be saying it, this facility is worse than useless. How many times has a buyer said to you “but I asked you…”, and you’ve thought “ah, don’t blame me for your mistake!” Now I know what happened to those notes. I just didn’t see them, because I didn’t know they could be there.
There is nothing in SMP or My Messages or My eBay to say that a note from a buyer exists. Instead, sellers have to open up each individual order details page, and check for a very small link at the bottom. Even getting to the order details is a long-winded process: they can be found via My eBay Sold Items (on the drop down list for each item), or from SMP by clicking the checkout date on the Sales Record, or from the link at the top of a closed listing for a single item, or from the Purchases page for a closed listing for multiple items. Obviously if you’ve sold more than one item in a day, this is going to make processing your orders much, much more onerous.
click to embiggen
Just to compound the confusion, the link doesn’t appear if there is no note from a buyer (or at least, we think that’s what’s happening).
A thread on the UK Powerseller forum [PS signin required] suggests that Allan’s not the only one with the same problem. At best, this wastes everyone’s time as sellers chase buyers for information they’ve already supplied; at worst - as in Allan’s case - this can mean that a parcel ends up in the wrong hemisphere.
eBay desperately need to make these messages more visible to sellers: personally I’d like to see them show up in My eBay and in SMP, and be printed out on the SMP packing slip too. That way, there’s no chance I’m going to miss them! In the meantime, I’ll be the one clicking through my orders, one by one, with a very unhappy look on my face.
Recent Comments
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