Wednesday 12 September 2012

Biggest problems for new eBay sellers and how to overcome them

With literally hundreds of thousands of people selling through eBay in the United Kingdom alone, online selling is more popular now than it has ever been. While there are thousands of people purchasing products online every day, many new eBay stores face a number of problems that they must first overcome in order to achieve long term success.

Fees

Whether your new to eBay or have been selling on eBay for a number of years, insertion fees are something you are always going to have to pay in order to have your items listed on eBay. However, depending on what you sell and how much you are charging, the amount you will have to pay as an insertion fee will differ. If you sell an item for under 99p it is free for you to list, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, if you list a  product for over £100 then you will have to an insertion fee of £1.30. You can find a full list of all the insertion fees on the eBay website. However, eBay are currently running a promotion for some categories such as "Outdoor Sports" and "Sports Memorabilia," where you will be able to list products for free until the end of the year. 

Feedback 

For a new online store, feedback from your customers will make or break your store. Feedback comes in the form of your detailed seller rating (DSR). A high detailed seller rating shows not only high levels of trust to the customer that they will be able to carry out an honest transaction with yourself, but also tells the customer that the items they will purchase from your store are of a good quality. However, when starting a new eBay store, you are kind of in a catch 22 situation. As you are a new store, you have no feedback, which means that in order to get this trustworthy rating that will entice customers to purchase from your store, you must first have people actually purchase items from you.

In order to get the positive feedback needed to make your store a success, you must make sure that all aspects of your store keep the customer happy throughout their purchasing experience. This means that not only should the product be of a good quality, it should be dispatched in a reasonable time and be delivered to them within the delivery time you stated on your store. If any of these aspects of the purchasing experience fail to live up to the customer's expectations, it is going to result in having a lower feedback rating. Once you have achieved a good feedback level, you will see traffic and sales levels for your store increase. 

Selling Restrictions

If you are do not have an eBay store, but are simply someone who sells products on the marketplace through a regular account, you may find that you have selling restrictions placed on your account, meaning you can only list a maximum of 100 products a month to the value of £3000. In order to remove this restriction, you must get a good feedback level through sales, as I explained in greater detail in the earlier "Feedback" section. However, there is another way around this. If you have another eBay account that you have previously used to sell different products in the past, you can contact eBay and inform them that you have two accounts and they will then remove the restrictions on your account so that they match the limits on your other account. 

Delivery

The delivery process for your ecommerce store is important for a number of reasons. Obviously, the most important part of the delivery process is ensuring that any items purchased by customers are delivered to them on time in order to make them a satisfied customer, who will turn into a repeat buyer. When choosing the delivery company for your business, it is important that you choose a delivery company that has their deliveries tracked. Although the majority of customers are honest when it comes to purchasing items, there are some who will look to essentially scam you. If you use a delivery service that doesn't offer tracking, it will mean that after a few days the customer could claim that they never received the item, even though they may have done. This will result in Paypal refunding the price of the product to the customer and then taking the cost from you. This will leave you without a product and without the money from the sale. If you have a tracked delivery service they will be unable to do this as you will have proof that their product was delivered to them. 

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