Thursday, August 5, 2010
Managing your time as an eBay seller.
As you start to become successful on eBay you will notice you become busier and it can start to take over your life.Well what if I told you I usually spend no more than an hour or two a day running my eBay business. I actually spend more time doing things like writing/compiling eBooks or doing things like this review. The last thing you want to do is have eBay take over your life, especially if you hold a regular job too.This is where you have an advantage as an eBook seller, every single task apart from support can be automated. You can automate delivery, feedback, listing items, re-listing, everything. If you were selling something like DVDs or regular books you would constantly be printing shipping labels, packing parcels, going to the post office, dealing with lost parcels, etc. Believe me I have done that and it really can start to take over your life.When I discovered eBooks I could not believe how easy it can be once everything is set up correctly. Here are a few things you will want to automate. Delivery This can be done with outlook express or special software Listing items - Check out turbo lister Feedback and re-listing - Check out Selling Manager ProThe tools above can make a dramatic effect on the time it takes to run your business. I would personally recommend them all. However, Selling Manager Pro comes at a cost but for me the small cost is nothing compared to the time it saves.So now you have everything automated and running like clockwork, this leaves one thing, support.You will be bombarded with questions from buyers and potential buyers, how you run your support is what can make or break you because if you give poor support you can be open to negative feedback. Here are a few tips to help your business run smoothly.1, Always always always be polite in any communications with other eBay members. You will receive arrogant emails from buyers with no manners and may be quite shocked in the early days just how rude some people can be. Just rise above it and answer their query in a polite and professional way. After a while you will become immune to the rude people out there. You will also receive a lot of questions from newbies, can you remember when you first got started on eBay? I know I can, well newbies don't know it all yet and will ask some very basic questions indeed and it can be quite easy to send a short, sharp response, just remember to be as helpful as possible as you could be their first eBay experience.Remember! Good manners cost nothing.2, Keep things business like, you will get someone telling you their life story in a 2000 word email. It is quite easy to spend 30 minutes a day with one person if youre not careful and this is not good for business. I would recommend you simply reply by answering any questions related to the product you are selling and nothing else.3, Keep on top of your emails, I usually have 100 emails a day to get through so I try and keep on top of things by answering my emails at least twice a day. If I go over 24 hours I am usually looking at a 2-3 hour session so try and keep on top of your emails, plus a fast response is always appreciated.4, Very important. You will find you get asked the same questions over and over again, especially from the newbies. What I do is save pre-written responses to my most common questions in a folder as text documents. Then all I have to do is copy the text document and paste this in my reply and hit send. This makes what could be a 5 minute response take 10 seconds. Over time you will find the best responses to save. You can also save responses as email signatures or email documents but I personally prefer text documents.So there you go, all the above methods put together mean I can have 100s of auctions running and spend no more than 2 hours a day running my business. If there is one thing we all need more of in life it is time. So have a look at the tools I have suggested and see if it can help you run your business.
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