eBay Selling Secrets by Andrew Lock, the ‘Renegade eBay Auction Seller’

I was in Dallas recently and as I lined up waiting for a taxi, I was handed a comment card

On closer inspection, it was an invitation to rate my experience of taking a cab from DFW.

In some 17 years of fairly active travelling, this was the only occasion where I’d ever received such a comment card. That in itself is revealing.
Most companies don’t care about seeking the opinion of their customers. Those that do are often astonished at what they discover.

Let’s talk about the card I received for a moment, then we’ll apply the principles to your business.

The card sets up the request in a positive way by saying,

‘Our goal at DFW International Airport is to exceed our guest’s expectations.’

So far so good.

Then we’re given a guideline as to how long this is going to take us:

“Please take 2 minutes and tell us how we are doing, by completing the survey below.”

So we’re now aware of the time commitment and we’ve also been flattered with the reminder  that our opinion is important. After all, who doesn’t want to give their opinion, right?

The rest of the card is self explanatory, with most questions having a simple 1 to 5, ‘poor to excellent’ options. It’s important to make it easy for customers to take the action you want them to take. In this case, the card looks relatively easy to complete - it doesn’t seem daunting or off-putting.

It’s also worth noting that the card is handed to each person as they enter the taxi. In other words, at that point in time they’ll have opportunity to complete it. I suspect that if the forms were mailed to travellers, the response would be very low.

So overall, the folks at DFW did a good job with this card, and simply having it puts them streets ahead of other U.S. airports.

But they did miss one thing. Did you spot it?

They didn’t provide any incentive to complete the card other than the opportunity of the traveller to provide their opinion on the service they received. Although that invitation would have been enough for some people, for most it wouldn’t have been sufficient incentive. There needs to be a much more enticing ‘what’s in it for me’ factor.

It could be a prize draw, it could be a coupon for a free taxi ride, it could have been a discount on airport parking. Doesn’t really matter too much what the incentive is, but there does need to be one.

I said earlier that businesses that seek feedback from customers are often surprised at what they discover. This is why they’re so helpful. The opportunity to hear from customers in this way has extraordinary value for your business because you’ll discover things you’d never have picked up on in a million years of your own analysis. We’re all too close to our businesses. Customers will always see flaws (and positives) that we don’t see.

When invited to respond (with a small incentive as an ethical bribe), customers usually open up and reveal an incredible array of information. They’ll give you ideas for new products, suggestions on tweaking existing ones, and you’ll find many loyal advocates that you didn’t realize you had.

The process for soliciting feedback should fit the nature of your business. You can use comment cards if your interaction is primarily offline, or you can also survey customers online using tools such as Survey Monkey.

The more responses you receive the more useful the results will be in identifying what action needs to be taken. If a large percentage of customers are saying the same thing then obviously that matter needs urgent attention. Be careful about not dismissing numerous similar comments simply because don’t fit in with the way you do things currently in your business. Challenge convention and be willing to explore all possibilities to keep customers happy and coming back for more.

The humble customer comment card, or the online equivalent survey is a hopelessly underused tool. Encourage customers to contact you freely, take note of their comments, and take appropriate action wherever possible.

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Disney – the business that is, not so much the Mickey and the Minnie. Actually, I was probably one of the few kids in the world that didn’t grow up with a steady diet of Disney cartoons and movies – it wasn’t a deliberate decision to stay away from them, they just didn’t seem to resonate with me for some reason so I could take them or leave them, and mostly it was the latter.

As a result, whenever friends start reminiscing about their favorite Disney movies I find myself being able to contribute, well, nothing. What I can contribute is a near obsessive collection of facts, stories, lessons and insights about Disney the business.

So with that in mind, let me tell you about my recent visit to Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I was there for a seminar rather than a vacation, and the organizer had chosen the Contemporary Resort hotel, Disney’s first on property hotel that opened way back in October 1971, and it’s also the only hotel that the monorail rides through on the way to the Magic Kingdom (see, I told you I knew lotsa facts).

The hotel is about a 60 minute ride from the airport and I didn’t want to rent a car just for that so when Disney offered me a relatively new innovation called ‘Magical Express’ I thought I’d check it out.

On arrival at the airport I was directed to a lower level where I had to check-in at a counter. I only had to wait a couple of minutes - so far so good. Then I was directed outside where there were about a dozen buses. I discovered that my route included stops at two other hotels, ‘no problem’ I thought.

There were a few others already on the bus, a couple of families with kids who already seemed as though they’d had far too many M&M’s that day, a couple of other solo travellers, and myself. I always like to make good use of my time so I pulled out a book and got stuck into reading it. Well, several minutes went past, then I…

I noticed it had been 30 minutes. When you’re waiting to leave, every minute drags. 10 more minutes went past, then another (longer) 10, and most passengers were getting extremely annoyed. I don’t blame them, many of them had just come from very long flights with tired and irritable kids. Finally, just under an hour after I had boarded the bus, we set off. At this point the two other stops didn’t seem like such a good idea, but we had no choice, and finally more than 2 ½ hours later, I arrived at the hotel.

I told the girl who checked me in about what had happened and she managed an insincere and very brief apology, but moved on to serving the next customer without making me feel like a valued guest, or more importantly making a note of what had happened so she could pass it on and make sure it was fixed for other guests.

As it turned out, the service is apparently managed by a third-party company called ‘Mears’ who are a large transportation company in Orlando.

As you can imagine, I was not impressed with the Disney Magical Express. It was not run by Disney. It wasn’t magical in any way, and it could definitely NOT be classed as ‘express.’ So they failed on all three counts.

Here’s the problem with this, and it’s a BIG problem that we can all learn from. Oh, and of course, Disney of all businesses should know this.

“It was not run by Disney. It wasn’t magical in any way, and it could definitely NOT be classed as ‘express.’”

The FIRST interaction with Disney once I arrived at the airport, as well as those of my fellow travellers, was the ‘Disney Magical Express’. As you now know, it was not a good experience, in fact it was awful. But the fact that it was our first contact with Disney resulted in it setting the scene for the entire trip. Think about that. If I’d experienced an amazing welcome, great service and the usual Disney magical touches at the start, and then later in the week had that bad experience, it would have been much easier to forgive it. But since it was at the start of the trip, Disney had an uphill battle to try and win back unhappy customers. Our first impression of the company was poor.

Now, what about your company? Do you pay attention to who answers the phone and how they do it? Do you have a friendly, welcoming employee to greet customers who visit your office? These things matter a great deal. Your front line staff should be trained carefully. If you represent the front line yourself then you should train yourself. In other words, be constantly aware that your actions will cause customers to judge you and your business). Disney has an advantage over all of us. Over many decades they’ve established a reputation of keeping customers happy that is hard to match. They’re masters at it. So it’s easy to understand why I forgave them - but most customers aren’t as forgiving with other businesses they deal with. They’ll vote with their feet (or their mouse button when online). It’s so easy to be served elsewhere these days but most business owners don’t understand that. Customers are loyal to a point, and that breaking point will be longer if you have an existing good relationship with them. If they’re dealing with you for the first time, their tolerance will be virtually zero.

Disney screwed up big time in outsourcing their magical express service to Mears. They’re putting their reputation in another companies hands, and it’s clearly not working. Most people wouldn’t know that the service was outsourced, so they’ll judge Disney not Mears. Quite frankly, if Disney can’t or won’t take control of the service themselves, they shouldn’t offer it because it’s doing more harm than good.

If I’d known in advance that I was in for a 3 hour wait before I’d reach the hotel, I’d have taken a taxi and been quite happy about doing that.

I dread to think what it’s like in the height of summer when Orlando is hotter than a sauna with a broken thermostat, and people’s tempers are even more frayed.

There are things that can be successfully outsourced (I do it all the time) and there are other aspects to your business that you should keep control of. If you ever lose control of the interaction with customers by handing that to another provider, that should set alarm bells ringing. Bottom line - don’t do it.

There was a happy ending in my case. Disney more than made up for my bad experience on the first day, and by the end of the trip I was full of praise for the hotel and their staff. But be aware, if Disney can trip up, any of us can, and we will…

Regular eBay users know that the time of day when auction listings finish is very important in relation to the final price an item fetches. In other words, if you time the conclusion of your auction to coincide with the largest number of potential buyers on eBay, there are more people to bid on the item in its last few minutes. That’s no secret, but here’s the thing…

Most books about eBay will tell you that Sunday evening is the best time to end an auction listing. But hard facts prove otherwise in most cases.

When I discovered this for myself while selling across multiple categories on eBay, I delved deeper to discover the reasons why. Here’s what I found…

Firstly, buyers use their computers at different times. Some are business buyers who only look at eBay during week day business hours. Others are older people who go to bed early and would never be looking on a Sunday evening.   Many housewives use the computer in the morning when the kids are at school. This is common sense, but it’s ignored by most  eBayers. You can being to see that it’s ridiculous to ‘pigeon hole’ all eBay users with the sweeping assumption that they all buy on Sunday evening.

Secondly, because most sellers now believe that Sunday evening is the best time to end an auction, that results in a huge surge of auctions that finish at that time! Ironically, as the Sunday evening myth spread through the eBay comminity, it eventually became a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a result, the market is literally swamped with auctions at that time, and individual listings get lost like a needle in a haystack.Quite simply, to say that it’s best to finish an auction on Sunday evening is like saying it’s best to drive in rush hour because there are more cars on the road! Having lots of listings available at the same time means more intense competition, and that in turn generally leads to lower final prices (and profit).

Ultimately it depends on a number of factors: what the item is, who the target market is, where that market predominantly lives, when they buy, and so on. It’s different for different markets.

For example, in some of the categories in which I sell, I have discovered that Tuesday evening is the best time to conclude my listings. On the other hand, a friend of mine who sells products for businesses reports that Thursday lunchtime is consistently the best time to end his auctions.

“Sunday evening is NOT the best time to end an auction, in fact it could be the worst.”

Fortunately, there is a way to determine the best ending time for YOUR items, and it’s a definitive answer. How so? It’s a tool called Hammertap, you can find it at www.auctionresearchtool.com – you may have heard me refer to it as my secret weapon and that’s a very fitting description. I use it almost every day to find out definitively how I should list new items. It completely eliminates the guesswork.

You can now see that Sunday evening is NOT the best time to end an auction, in fact it could be the worst. The renegade auction seller (you) should use a tool such as Hammertap to learn the best times for your products.

This is yet another example of why you should NOT follow the crowd. Most eBay sellers are lemmings, they follow each other in doing things wrong!

When I was growing up the world seemed like a VERY large place. These days it seems small. The change has to do with communication. We can hear about something that happened thousands of miles away in a few seconds. With the Internet it’s also become substantially easier to sell to people in other countries.

YOU can benefit from this revolution in business.

No other website makes it as easy to offer products and services to people in other countries than eBay. That’s a fact, and it should be exciting to you. Yet most sellers are still reluctant to step outside their comfort zone to make their items available abroad.

This means that the opportunity for you is unprecedented. Sellers that make the effort to sell in other countries are often exploding their profits as a result. Make this a formal part of your business.

“No other website makes it as easy to offer products and services to people in other countries than eBay.”

Your eBay user ID will work across all the international eBay sites, and if you live in the USA, the most popular exports right now are to Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, and France.

PayPal makes the monetary aspect easy, and you even have the option to accept payment in the foreign currency or have PayPal convert it for you into the currency of where you live, at competitive exchange rates.

What about shipping? Well, the national postal service of most countries makes this a breeze. In the U.S. for example it’s relatively inexpensive to ship items around the world, and the airmail delivery times are faster than most people realize.

Obviously, ensure that you get some kind of tracking service if you can, pack the item well, and always ask for a signature if the item is expensive.

What can you sell? Ideally you should look for items that have a high dollar value in relation to their weight. For example, MP3 players, watches etc fit that description. Beyond that, the ideal place to start is to think about what items you can source that aren’t readily available in other countries. As an example, my wife did a roaring trade selling American candies to the British. She also discovered that many Americans living abroad ordered consignments from her. Luci shipped out all kinds of candy bars and she didn’t even buy them wholesale. The mark-up was so good that she didn’t need to.

Why not visit ex-pat forums online and see what they miss? I can assure you that people are wiling to pay a premium to acquire products that they can’t get locally.

My advice is to start by selling to english speaking countries. Prove the concept and then you can expand by having your listings translated into other languages. On the eBay forums there are a number of sellers who offer that service. There are also online tools such as Babel Fish. Avoid abbreviations and colloquial expressions.

Look out for favorable exchange rates too. As an example, most items in the UK sell for around the same in pounds as they are in dollars. But with the exchange rate it’s possible for a U.S. seller to double their money when they convert the Great Britain Pounds (GBP) into U.S. dollars.

Now you can grab many more customers!

As a young and struggling artist, Pablo Picasso at times kept warm by burning his own paintings. Really.

Now, consider that in 2004 this Picasso painting was sold at auction for $104 million…

Three other Picasso’s have sold for prices ranging from $50 million to $95 million. For a painting.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I reckon Picasso should have made a bit of an extra effort and stepped outside to pick up some twigs as fire wood rather than burn the paintings. But the fact that he didn’t nicely illustrates the point that few of us believe that what we do is really talented. We believe that anyone can do what we do.

Well, yes and no…

You see, while it’s true that most people can accomplish whatever they want if they set their minds to it, they don’t. They focus on a few areas of interest, and so do we. Which means we’re all good at different things.

I marvel at people who can cook a gourmet meal. I’m in awe of someone whose beautiful singing voice sends shivers down my spine. I’m constantly impressed when I see how a craftsman can create a piece of furniture from blocks of wood. I have friends who posess all of these skills and yet they tell me that they wish they knew marketing like I do. For awhile I found that puzzling because I’m sure that any one of them could acquire the same knowledge. But that’s not the point. They haven’t, and they won’t unless they’re really interested in pursuing it. There’s also the aspect of experience. I have years of experience with my skills, just as they have with theirs.

As you might expect, whenever I praise the abilities and achievments of my friends they down play them, dismissing them by saying, “it’s nothing”.

“If you know just a little more than the average person about a particular subject then you’re qualified to teach others for a fee.”

I sincerely hope you understand this lesson because it’s crucially important to your success. Regardless of your own beliefs, you DO have knowledge, skills and abilities that others would be willing to pay you to teach them.

If you know just a little more than the average person about a particular subject then you’re qualified to teach others for a fee. And what better way of monetizing your skills and knowledge than by producing a training course that people can study in their home.

This kind of product will always sell well on eBay, and in my opinion it’s the very best type of product to sell in that environment for lots of reasons that I’ve mentioned before.

Coming back to the theme of this article ultimately it’s all about self-limiting beliefs. You can see that most of the time they’ll hold you back from achieving financial success.

Another good example of a self limiting belief that held people back for years was the 4 minute mile. In 1954 Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile mental ‘barrier’. Up until that time it was thought to be impossible for a human to achieve that. The really interesting fact was that the following year another 37 people broke the 4 minute mile, and the year after that another 300 runners did it!

I can only emphasize again that you DO know a lot more than you think you do. I could learn useful skills from every single reader of this newsletter, including you! Now get to work and produce a training course!

A.L.O. is a term I coined which stands for ‘Auction Listing Optimization’. It can be defined as ANYTHING you do within the eBay environment that increases the number of people buying from your listings, or that prompts buyers to go directly to your website. Each month I discuss an A.L.O. technique that you can implement to increase the effectiveness of your eBay listings…

The logos you can see on this page need no introduction, do they? You’re familiar with them all. And therein is a lesson, a secret of sales psychology.

Familiarity is very important in sales. Buyers approach your listings on eBay from a standpoint of skepticisim. They don’t know you, and they’re waiting for you to provide proof that you can be trusted. One way to do that is to use testimonials, and that’s an area we’ve covered in the past.

Another way is to use recognizable brands. Why?

By attaching yourself to well known brands like the ones you see here, the buyer subconciously feels more comfortable, and you’ll get more sales as a result.

Buyers perceive it as an indirect seal of approval. The reasoning that goes on in their heads without them realizing it is, ‘if Amex and Visa are doing business with this seller, they must have been checked out and I’m sure I can trust them too!

In other words, it’s ‘approval by association’.

This is a very subtle but effective way of winning over prospective buyers, and the technique works in any online environment whether it’s an eBay listing or your own website. Of course, you should have some relationship with any brands you advertise, and you should seek their approval first. It’s free advertising for them, so most brands are happy for you to include their logo. This simple addition to your listings and your website can gain you a lot more customers…

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