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Are you spamming your customers?

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?

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.

Nice try…

Something amusing amongst the normal flood of Chinese “authentic designer gear” spam this morning:

As ebays only aortorised serplier if your dont buy our products you will suffer suspensions from selling.

You have to give them full marks for trying!

eBay fight back against spoof emails

Rob Chesnut had some interesting news today, eBay are fighting back with new technology to step the tide of phishing emails. In a session at eBay Live! he confirmed that Domain Key Signatures are being introduced to all eBay emails. Domain Key Signatures allow ISPs to check that the email actually came from eBay, and if not it can be dumped before it hits the recipients email inbox.

Yahoo are going to start blocking unauthorised spoof emails from June this year, and other ISPs will follow suit in the near future.

In addition Rob emphasised that all eBayers (and in fact all Internet Users) should upgrade to the most recent browsers such as Internet Explorer version 7 and FireFox version 3 if they haven’t already.

There was an interesting explanation of how reporting spoof emails works. When it’s forwarded to spoof@ebay.com or spoof@paypal.com it hits a bank of computers which scan the email for URLs and check them against a database. If the URL has been seen before no further action is taken. If however it’s the very first instance of that URL within minutes a member of the Trust and Safety team will examine it, and if it’s a spoof further action is taken. The URL is entered into a global database that all banks and other institution subject to phishing can access. Then the ISP hosting the spoof website is contacted and normally the site is offline within about ten hours.

The database the URLs are entered into is important for every web user - if they try to access the URL in the latest browsers the browser will automatically check the database and warn the user with a red title bar that they’re on a known spoof site. This highly visual warning happens before the page loads so that the user can close their browser and type the URL of the site they intended to visit before entering any data such as user names and passwords.

The news is not unexpected, but it’s good to know Trust and Safety are proactively fighting spoof and phishing and interesting to know more about how the process works when you report a spoof email.

Are Auctiva spamming your customers?

Steve Seddon sells audio books from his eBay shop, Okantfoss Audios, and uses Auctiva to showcase his entire range on individual listings. But they’ve been causing him problems…

Many sellers use Auctiva’s services, whether for picture hosting, scheduling, templates or just - as I do - the free scrolling gallery. Recently Auctiva launched a new service: after a sale, they email the winning bidder to confirm the sale and request payment.

Most professional sellers will already be using either eBay’s order confirmation & request for payment emails or their own system, particularly if the only service they use is the scrolling gallery. Another email from a company the buyer doesn’t recognise (maybe we’re getting to the point here) can only be overkill.

Auctiva have by default opted every user “in” to this new service, even if they only ever use the scrolling gallery. They have not publicised the launch to their users, or told users that they need to go into their Auctiva account and disable the setting if they don’t want these emails to be sent to their buyers.

If Auctiva sending spam payment request emails without your permission to your customers isn’t bad enough, these emails are going out weeks after the sale was concluded. Understandably, buyers receiving reminders about orders they’ve paid, received and almost forgotten about, are not happy. Even after opting out, (remember these emails are going out weeks late) the emails keep going right up until the date you switched them off. So, in my case, that’s two more weeks of time wasted answering worried buyers’ emails.

There’s little that can be done now except to switch the emails off and keep reassuring the buyers. But I’ll think twice before allowing a third party free access to my buyers again.

WebProNews, iEntry, spammers

WebProNews (no link, you’ll see why…) quite often turn up articles that look like they might be interesting. That must have been why I signed up for their email list (which I did, I admit), is administered by iEntry Inc. (again, no link). Just recently, though, the mail has got more frequent and less relevent, so I unsubscribed via the link in the mail. And unsubscribed the next day. And the next. Then I mailed iEntry direct. Then I mailed the whois contacts on both domains. I’m still getting mail.

So firstly, don’t sign up for any mail from these spammers. And secondly, given that I’m in France and they’re in the US (I assume) and that having my lawyer write to them isn’t an option, what do I have to do to get off their lists?

How to send spam via eBay’s system

If you’re a spammer, here’s a handy hint on how to send spam via eBay’s contact a member facility: use non-Latin alphabet characters, and send the longest message you can. When the unhappy recipient of your spam tries to report you, the system will reject their report, because *your* message is too long. Even if they elect not to include your message, they still won’t be able to report your spam. Spam it, send it, love it!

£750 damages for being spammed

A Scottish man has been awarded £750 damages against a firm he claims spammed him. Gordon Dick, from Edinburgh, said “The courts have now sent a clear message, spam will not be tolerated and individuals’ rights to not have their mailbox filled with unsolicited advertising will be upheld.”

The firm in question, Transcom, failed to appear in court, but their director said that they do not send out spam, only an annual marketing mail to existing customers, from which they could easily unsubscribe. He said that Mr Dick had been an accidental recipient of an email because both he and Transcom belong to an email group operated by Nominet, the UK domain name registry.

It’s often said that - despite European legislation - it’s difficult to take any action against spammers, as so much spam originates in the US and in China. What this case does seem to illustrate is that hacked off recipients will go for the targets they *can* hit, and that may well mean British firms who are not careful enough about who receives their marketing email. If you’re running a mailing list for your website customers, you should make it opt-in only, and give recipients the opportunity to unsubscribe with every email. This is, of course, the advantage with eBay email marketing: all the opt-in and the opt-out is handled for you.

Spam me, eBay, one more time

I know it’s not like me to complain that eBay communicate too much: normally, it’s exactly the opposite. But this week, I’ve had a bunch of communication from them that’s gone beyond pointless, deep into ‘completely infuriating’ territory.

Firstly, we have the “you’ve changed your email” alert. Actually, I have two, because my main email account went down on Friday, came back Sunday, and so I changed to an alternate and then changed it back again. eBay put alerts in My Messages, great. And then they tell me I can’t delete those alerts for ten whole day. WTF? I’ve read the messages, I made the changes, it’s all legit, why do I have to have that stupid red blob at the top of my screen making me think that my seller account is overdue or some buyer has filed for non-something or other? I don’t need it, eBay, I really don’t.

Secondly, there’s eBay’s neat trick to double your spam. For some reason, rather a lot of Chinese wholesalers think that my gothy jewellery-selling ID might wish to invest in their electrical products. In fact, they’re so sure that I should become a customer of theirs that on Christmas Day, they sent me spam ASQs from a dozen different accounts with the same enticing message. I know there’s nothing eBay can really do about spam ASQs; I’ve been getting them for seven years, and I can deal with them. On Boxing Day, I duly clicked the “report” link beside each one in My Messages and grassed them up as spammers. So far, so good.

But then I received back, for each spamming ID, a “Communication Partner Warning” from eBay, informing me that a member with whom I had recently communicated had now been excommunicated from the site. These were not people from whom I’d bought, or to whom I’d sold. They were people who had sent me ONE email, whom I’d reported. And gotten a whole bunch more spam back from eBay as a result. Thanks. Thanks SO much.

Finally, and perhaps least expicable, is the “Notification of Change to my Feedback”:

They obviously liked me because I got fifteen of those messages: musta been a nice big order. But do eBay tell me who it was? Nope, not a clue. So what was the point of that? They don’t tell me who the dodgy buyer was so I can look out for them when they re-register, or suggest that I keep an eye on their Paypal payment as a potential chargeback. Maybe they want to to make phishers lives easier by encouraging clicking of links in emails (which it does - I get this message from phishers too)? Who knows.

Please could someone who designs this rubbish for eBay actually start using the site, get rid of the stupid over-communication when it serves no purpose, and start communicating with users about the things that actually matter.

Cobb phish

As a special holiday gift for my friend Fruity, I’d like to share the lastest phishing email (fifteen copies received this morning). I have been known to say that the sheer volume of eBay phishes are just an indication of eBay’s success, but I’m really not sure what to make of this one:

Click the piccie to read the full, nauseatingly patronising but somehow familiar text.

Poor Bill: I bet he’s really looking forward to the next Town Hall now.

Have you got anything without spam?

Up to 80% of spam may be generated by just ten people. May they all spend eternity in Hell trying to weed orders from amongst rubbish about pharmaceuticals and fake watches.

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