subject: Five Simple Ways To Boost Your eBay Reputation [print this page] Five Simple Ways To Boost Your eBay Reputation
Selling items or services on eBay is a double-edged sword that can make or break your income stream in a heartbeat. It's not much of a problem to sell the stuff from your attic or garage on eBay, but to create a sustaining income that will kick off your desire to create a home business is another process entirely.Simple tweaks and changes in your "garage sale" auctions can change your presence on eBay auctions and make dramatic, lucrative changes in your sales.1. Have a good photo taken for your "About Me" page. Don't use your driver's license photo if you want to attract buyers to your products. Looking like you just survived being run over by a truck on your "About Me" page won't help your eBay standing one bit. Use your profile on the page to give yourself some credibility with the buyers who check you out before they will do business with you. Many will.2. Select several highly professional eBay marketers or Power Sellers and check out their profile pages for good examples on how to present yourself to your potential customers/bidders. You need to start building a reputation for reliability and professionalism from the first day you decide to sell on eBay. Tentative buyers will be more likely to buy from you if you offer a strong money back guarantee if your products do not live up to your auction descriptions or they arrive damaged. Granted, some buyers will try to scam you, but most will not and the "bad press" you will get for refusing to honor your guarantee will stay in your potential buyer's minds. You can, of course, publish what you will honor on your guarantee, like 30-day limits on returns.3. eBay's satisfaction ratings are important to your customer satisfaction. One way to get great, positive ratings from your customers is to give them a positive rating as buyers of your products. You can also sell good quality, inexpensive items to boost the number of ratings you get. If your ratings still lag, eBay will allow a polite email request for a rating from your recent customers.4. Jacked up shipping rates have a major damaging effect on your reputation with customers and will reduce your sales to nothing quickly. Gone are the days when customers were uninformed and naive about shipping rates for most items. If they don't know, they can and will check it online if it seems outrageous and you will lose them forever. Buyers expect to pay shipping for the items they win at your auctions or "Buy Now" offerings and will accept a reasonably higher shipping cost if you mention handling fees, which includes the cost of wrapping and shipping supplies. They will not tolerate a blatant, transparent attempt to increase your profit with unreasonable fees.5. One way new eBay sellers can waste a lot of money in a short time is to buy all the embellishments eBay makes available to you. When customers are searching for auctions with items like yours, they do not search for the names of those expensive embellishments. They search with very specific keywords, like blenders, ebooks or rare coins, for example.The point is that you will be competing against every other eBay seller with the same or similar items and your reputation, including excellent sales methods, will build both your customer base and your income.
