Thursday, March 18, 2010

7 Tips on How to Raise Your eBay Seller Ratings from Frooition

Article from Frooition's Blog

Securing and maintaining eBay’s Top-Rated Seller status should be high on any seller’s to do list. eBay education specialist Mark Buckingham offers a few top tips to help you bolster the fortunes of your eBay Empire.

Introduced in October, the Top-rated Seller program distinguishes the cream of eBay sellers…and it is achievable for the majority:


  1. Strive for 5 stars: Avoiding low 1 and 2 stars is key to the Top-Rated program, so communicate to your buyers the importance of Detailed Seller Ratings and feedback. Use your custom emails in Selling Manager Pro to keep your customers apprised, add compliment slips to remind your buyers where they bought the item from and highlight other special offers, and don’t hesitate to pick up the phone if a buyer isn’t happy.
  2. Understand Best Match: From meeting eBay’s basic seller standards, to understanding recent sales score and impressions it’s well worth doing a little homework to get to grips with exactly how Best Match sorts matching listings. Get Best Match savvy, and you’ll reap the rewards.
  3. Pick your ‘carrots’: Top-Rated Seller is partly calculated by number of transactions, so consider adding cheaper cost-neutral lines that will sell in volume and could help pad out your feedback, and help absorb any low scores. It will also help generate extra footfall into your shop. Don’t forget to use Good-til-Cancelled multi-quantity listings to save you re-listing the item and jeopardizing your sales-score.
  4. Manage buyer expectations: setting and exceeding expectations is all-important. In my experience, a buyer won’t mind waiting a week if they know in advance. Don’t promise a turnaround shipping and delivery time you can’t realistically fulfill.
  5. Anticipate problems: Look at your Detailed Seller Rating and feedback history and see where low scores and non-positive comments have been left, and look for trends. Perhaps particular lines in your eBay Store are more problematic than others? If so, take time to give those buyers extra-special customer service.
  6. Offer free shipping: This is part of the Best Match algorithm – eBay announced they give a boost to listings offering free shipping. Of course, there’s rarely such a thing as free shipping, but it pays to build it into your unit cost, or subsidize it as best you can.
  7. Beat your competition: Frooition customers already have an advantage over most sellers who don’t have a professional setup. But it still pays to know your competition and to be creative. Get into the habit of scouring eBay’s Completed Items searches and other research products like Terapeak, to see how your competitors are fairing. Look carefully to see what value other sellers are offering and how you can add more value and stand out from the crowd. Be creative. Consider embellishing your gallery thumbnails and consider adding a subtitle if you haven’t already. Even stating how much money the buyer is saving might mean the difference between winning a loyal buyer or giving your competitors the upper hand.

This article has been condensed. To read the full article, click here.

Frooition is a leading provider of eBay store and listing designs. Frooition provide design services for most other online sales channels as well as website design. Frooition has been working with the eBay platform more than 4 years and has clients in the USA, Canada and Europe.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, I have been selling on Ebay for just about a year, and I wanted to let you all know that, all of these tips and news letters, have been educational and very helpull, I really wanted to dive into opening a ebay store, but but with todays economy, I think ebay should lower the monthly fee for the beginners.The Power seller should be your cash cow $ $ !!!

eBay Certified Provider Program said...

Hello Anthony,

Happy to hear you are finding our articles and such helpful!

You are probably aware, but eBay recently announced lower listing fees for eBay sellers to help make selling on eBay more affordable. If needed, you can check out the full details here - http://announcements.ebay.com/2010/01/our-lowest-insertion-fees-ever-coming-this-spring-free-auction-style-listings-fixed-price-as-low-as-3%C2%A2-with-full-search-exposure/

Thanks,

Ginger
eBay Certified Provider Program