Here’s one of my clients interviewed on the local news after finding $6,000 in an Ovaltine can at an Estate Sale.
Unbelievable story!
what do you do when the buyer wants a refund, and you’re not so sure they deserve one? Do you go back and forth badgering about who did what wrong, wasting both your and their time?
I’ve found that refunds can be solved, very very quickly.
1. You need to have a value in your head of what the effect to your sales will be for each negative and neutral feedback is.
2. If total potential amount of the refund is less than that value, then you can quickly resolve the situation.
Ask the buyer what refund amount they would be happy with. Often it is less than you think.
Example – you feel a negative feedback is worth $100 of negative worth to your sales.
A buyer doesn’t receive an item that is worth $18 total (includes shipping). They won’t take no for an answer even though you state in your listing that you don’t offer refunds on lost items. (we all get these types of byers occasionally)
Whether or not they truly deserve it, you ask them how much they want in a refund. They say $10.
Refund sent, their happy, they leave a positive, your happy that the situation is over with.
So questions to keep in mind – how much do you value your time at? and How much is preventing a negative feedback worth to you?
More to come on this later
this is from alleyinsider.com
“How To Game eBay’s New System
After watching his listings disappear from eBay’s search results because he didn’t have perfect ratings, our seller discovered something. If he created a new user ID, his listings would appear at the top of the search results. So now he creates new seller IDs until each gets a less-than-perfect seller rating, at which point he retires them.
How much of a difference does this make? The seller says the products with new (perfectly-rated) IDs sell at a $10-$50 profit. The products sold with his own feedback rating, meanwhile, lost $10-$20 per sale.”
while we’re all still adjusting to the ebay changes, keep an eye on your selling manager dashboard, what your search standing reads. Lower, higher, or standard. And then do some tests on your items in search to see if other seller’s items are coming up higher than yours in search, even though their auction ends after yours.
The auto-setting when a buyer searches is now set on ‘best-match’ which takes into account seller ratings. A buyer can adjust the search terms to ending soonest for example, but I don’t believe that many casual buyers know the difference, care to do so, or know that anything even changed at all.
when signing up for a Photobucket pro account they let you do a trial offer on various sites instead of pay the $25. They had a stamps.com offer, so I tried it. This was about 6 weeks ago, and I’ve printed over 100 labels with it since.
I like it, it is easy to use, it keeps good records, and it allows me to print first class international postage (which you can’t do when printing off of paypal). It never has any errors, and buying additional postage is very easy.
They even called me with a security check the third today I had been using it to make sure I was happy with the service, and to ensure that I was really the person on the credit card (I had been printing hundreds of dollars of postage).
The only downside: Getting a postage refund on international postage. If you mess up, or if your label does not print, you cannot click “refund postage” like you can on Paypal. You have to mail it in. Out of the 150 or so labels I’ve printed so far, I have about 5 refunds I need to apply for. We’ll see how it goes.
Or better yet, two yellow tape measures (yellow shows up better in photographs). And if it is a 3-dimensional item, use three tape measures!
It will save you time as there will be such fewer questions on the size of an item.
If it is an item where the exact size is very important, you will still have to mention the size in the description.
quick summary: best offer can give you a higher profits because it allows you to raise your store inventory prices.
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example: you list an item at auction for $19.90. it doesn’t sell. You decide to put it in your store. You raise the price to $24.90 and give it the best offer feature. You’re happy if it sells for anything over $15. Two weeks later an offer comes in at $22. Higher than what the auction price was. You accept the offer. You’re happy, the buyer is happy.
I love the ‘best offer’ feature on ebay, because it benefits the seller in a couple of ways. With an auction, you can freely list an item that you are unsure of its value because when done correctly the market will determine its sales price. Best offer can act the same way. You can price your item in your store higher, and the market will let you know what it is worth. If low offers keep coming in, then your item is probably priced too high.
2. Best offers give the buyer options. ‘Okay this item is priced way over value, but… here’s what I’m willing to pay for it.’ Best offer allows you to find a buyer’s maximum willingness to pay, and you get the opportunity to choose to accept it or reject it. It also helps you determine a more realistic market value for an item if low offers are coming in.
3. Best part of Best Offer – you can raise your prices! Often times you will get the buyer who comes across the item, just wants to buy it right then, (or doesn’t know what the best offer feature is), and just clicks ‘buy it now’ – at your higher sales rate.
Raise your prices a % above what you want for it. The new raised price needs to be realistic, such that the buyer feels that it is worth even making an offer.
4 Problems with store inventory items without best offer – if priced to high, they may just sit, and sit, and sit and never sell. Buyers see the high price, and just go away because they have no options. Very few (or likely none) will actually contact the seller to see if they will lower their price.
One problem I have with ebay & best offer is that ebay currently doesn’t let you bulk accept offers (you can get around this by setting a best offer auto accept $ value or % on blackthorne). I typically set mine at a % of the listed price.
Conclusion: Offer ‘best offer’ on all your store inventory listings. One thing to be careful of – if you are selling similar items, be careful that buyers don’t see your accepted best offer values in completed listings. Then they know exactly what to offer.
There supposedly is a way to turn your listings off from showing up in completed listings, but this is something I need to look into.
old news now, but July 11 ebay announced they are no longer including neutral feedback in the the calculation. I agree with this, but two things I had been thinking about:
- All seller’s feedback numbers changed at the same time relative to other sellers, so it wouldn’t have such an alarming effect to the buyer.
- Does a buyer really perceive a difference between 99.9% and 99.6% ? I think no… but definitely from 100% to 99.9%, or 90% to 89.9%.
The sellers who did get burned were ones that lost powerseller status because their feedback score was too low, or other effects to their account, such as lowered search ranking.
But really if you can’t keep your feedback score above 99% something is wrong with your strategy.
Setting up a new ebay account is time consuming.
Also, ebay announced some plans for a buyer to be able to revise feedback if the seller fixes the situation (or pays the buyer off via Paypal).
What dollar value do you place on a negative feedback on your score? What lengths would you go to to negotiate with the buyer to get it removed?
Turning those negatives into neutrals or even positives can be huge. As buyers are becoming more and more educated (it only takes one item never received) they are looking more at our feedback.
thanks for reading my first entry. more info about myself, and my auction experience to come soon.
-Nandrin
