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Monday, April 7, 2008

How To Sell Well On Ebay

By Abhishek Abrol

Being a seller is a lot of responsibility, and sometimes you might feel like you are not doing everything you should be. This simple checklist will help you keep on top of things.

Have you found out everything you possibly could about your items? Try typing their names into a search engine – you might find out something you did not know. If someone else is selling the same thing as you, then always try to provide more information about it than they do.

Do you monitor the competition? Always keep an eye on how much other items the same as or similar to yours are selling, and what prices they are being offered at. There is usually little point in starting a fixed price auction for $100 when someone else is selling the item for $90.

Have you got pictures of the items? It is worth taking the time to photograph your items, especially if you have a digital camera. If you get serious about eBay but do not have a camera, then you will probably want to invest in one at some point.

Are you emailing your buyers? It is worth sending a brief email when transactions go through: something like a simple “Thank you for buying my item, please let me know when you have sent the payment.” Follow this up with “Thanks for your payment, I have posted your [item name] today.” You will be surprised how many problems you will avoid just by communicating this way.

Also, are you checking your emails? Remember that potential buyers can send you email about anything at any time, and not answering these emails will just make them go somewhere else instead of buying from you.

Do your item description pages have everything that buyers need to know? If you are planning to offer international delivery, then it is good to make a list of the charges to different countries and display it on each auction. If you have any special terms and conditions (for example, if you will give a refund on any item as long as it has not been opened), then you should make sure these are displayed too.

Have you been wrapping your items correctly? Your wrapping should be professional for the best impression: use appropriately sized envelopes or parcels, wrap the item in bubble wrap to stop it from getting damaged, and print labels instead of hand-writing addresses. Oh, and always use first class post – do not be cheap.

Do you follow up? It is worth sending out an email a few days after you post an item, saying “Is everything alright with your purchase? I hope you received it and it was as you expected.” This might sound like giving the customer an opportunity to complain, but you should be trying to help your customers, not take their money and run.

Being a really good eBay seller, more than anything else, is about providing genuinely good and honest customer service. That is the only foolproof way to protect your reputation.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com

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Three Major Mistakes By New Online Business Entrants

By Rami Doleh

People who are starting their journey to establish their own online business, usually commit fatal mistakes that will result in the usual disappointments that we often see in this marketplace.

In this article we will list the usual mistakes committed by new entrants into the online business marketplace hoping that we will be able to help them avoid such mistakes from the very beginning.

Mistake No. 1: New entrants, or as the market calls them "newbies," usually start with excessive energy and the first thing they do is to search for online opportunities. This is the first huge mistake.

Mistake No. 2: A huge percentage of the opportunities that will come out of the search conducted in Mistake No. 1 are affiliate opportunities. A newbie would become more excited here after reading the hyped up sales letters that he/she is getting. Eventually the newbie will do the inevitable and take out the credit card to join one of those opportunities that promise income in no time. Even if the idea was legit and in many cases it will be, the prospect still does not know anything about online business, let alone affiliate marketing.

Mistake No. 3: After few days the newbie will discover that the opportunity that he/she joined is not making any money, so now it’s time to quit and search for something else. The newbie does not know that the problem is not really in the affiliate opportunity. Actually the newbie most probably still does not know that he/she is involved in affiliate marketing. After few trials with different affiliate opportunities the newbie realizes that this online business thing is crap and waste of time and money.

The above three mistakes can very easily be joined into one. The huge mistake that is conducted here is getting into online business head first without knowing anything about it.

The first step in anything in life is learning. Before thinking of establishing an online business, a newbie needs to know the following:

  1. What is online business and its different models?
  2. What is online marketing and how does it differ from one model to another?
  3. What are the different tools of online marketing?
These three questions are not easy to answer and online gurus have written a lost of e-books and articles trying to answer one or more of those questions. A newbie needs to search and read as much as possible about the above three issues so that he/she can create a personal opinion and then a decision.

The main resources a newbie should concentrate on to gather such information are the free resources. Don't go on buying e-books at the beginning, there is a lot of free information on the net. After you have exhausted this aspect you will have better knowledge to be able to decide which material to buy and which to avoid.

What are those free resources?:
  1. Articles Directories
  2. Blogs
  3. Forums
After getting the appropriate knowledge a newbie is able to do, take the following decisions consciously:
  1. Which online business model he/she going to adopt.
  2. Which marketing strategy and tools he/she is going to use.
This means if the newbie is going to search for affiliate opportunities, he/she is going to do it consciously knowing exactly what to look for.

In this article we have followed the steps approach, which means get the knowledge first and then have the business. We admit that there is another approach which is learning by doing. This means getting involved in a business and then applying what you learn to that business. This is a good approach only if you know which online business model you want to adopt.

Affiliate opportunities have started creating training resources and courses to enable their affiliates do a better job marketing their products and services.

The problem that I find here is that only a few affiliate opportunities have constructed a structured training that would train affiliates with zero background on the ins and outs of affiliate marketing. The majority have opted on collecting e-books and other resources and put them in one place for their members to read.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com

Rami Doleh has dedicated all available resources to put people on the right track and help them establish their affiliate business. For more information and to find how to contact Rami for any questions visit Affiliate Opportunities