For sellers, new eBay policies require shifting strategies

A bit of advice from the Creative eBay Selling Newsletter...

If you've been paying even slight attention to eBay lately, you've seen several changes.

This article isn't another "gripe" session though. You can find those easily in many other places.

First, let's talk about your eBay feedback score as a seller. eBay has recently started counting "neutral" feedback marks as negative for the purpose of calculating your feedback rating. In one swoop millions of accounts went from perfect to less than perfect.

I think this change actually helped eBay catch up with the rest of the world... I'll explain in a moment.

First, the bright side of this eBay change is that if you can manage to keep your feedback high you'll REALLY stand out now. I went from 100% to 99.5% myself and I'm still doing fine.

BUT... It's now more important than ever that you educate your customers on the importance of good feedback.

Here are a couple ideas:

> IMMEDIATELY leave feedback for all customers that buy from you. There is no benefit in waiting since you can no longer leave them neutral or negative feedback as a seller.

> Next, in all "post sale" email and shipping correspondence with customers include a statement something like this (even BEFORE they pay):

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We just left you positive feedback on eBay. Anything short of your 5 Star 100% positive feedback back to us considered to be a TOTAL FAILURE ON OUR PART because we want you 100% happy. If there is anything else we can do to earn your prompt 5 star 100% positive feedback please let us know at (email address). Here's a link to leave us PERFECT feedback once you are pleased with your experience:

http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?LeaveFeedback2
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Does that sort of thing bother you? Do you feel like you have to "cower" to the customer now?

I hear some eBay seller moaning statements like, "one little complaint can leave such a permanent stain."

Here's a little lesson (and a little reality) for you:

One of the reasons I like eBay as a training ground for bigger and better online projects is that it teaches you valuable lessons along the way.

Now that eBay has put ALL THE POWER in the hands of the customers they are one step closer to being JUST LIKE THE REST OF THE INTERNET.

The fact is, when you do business online it only takes ONE livid customer to CREATE CHAOS for you because they can flame on you all over the web if they want to.

I've done business with literally tens of thousands of customers and you'll be hard pressed to find complaints ANYWHERE. What you will find is RAVE REVIEWS.

My little secret is very simple.

I can't possibly expect every customer to be exceedingly happy with what they purchase, but how can they possibly complain if we go above an beyond to be available to them after the sale and quickly fix whatever issues come up? This includes extra bonuses, speedy support, and when necessary low resistance refunds.

Once again, the eBay training ground teaches us lessons if we'll pay attention.

If you are feeling "done" with focusing on JUST eBay then you need to join http://www.MySilentTeam.com where we talk about eBay AND several other proven online strategies that create streams of automated income.

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This advice is from the Creative eBay Selling Newsletter. Simply subscribing to Jim’s newsletter is worthwhile — even if you never buy anything — because the newsletter alone has given me a wealth of tips on selling on eBay.

Check out:
http://www.JimCockrum.com