Everything You Must Know Before Expanding to eBay Sales

MonsterPost Editorial

7 years ago

Almost a decade ago, I became familiar with the eCommerce world and saw an opportunity to make money online.

Back then I had three viable sales channels to start selling on:

My own online store
Amazon
eBay

I chose to start selling on eBay, which was the fastest and cheapest way to test out my online selling skills.

The registration process was more straightforward than Amazon’s, and uploading my first listing for sale was much faster than creating an entire webstore.

Fast forward a few years, and I was making over $4M in annual sales and gained the recognition from eBay by winning a couple of awards for outstanding sales.

Many of you reading this post probably started your eCommerce journey by opening a webstore and reached a point where you’re looking to expand your business to additional sales channels.

I’m going to share my top learnings from a decade of selling on eBay to help you avoid the mistakes I made and build a successful eBay sales channel quickly.

Guaranteed 3-day Delivery is the new standard

Whether you like it or not, Amazon pushed the boundaries of delivery times so hard that most buyers today expect to receive their goods within 2-3 days.

The big news in the eBay 2017 Fall Seller Update was the rollout of 3-day guaranteed delivery.

eBay decided to reward sellers who offer 3-day guaranteed delivery by providing them with:

Additional exposure in the search results
Higher rankings in search results

Both incentives help sellers get found by more buyers, thus increasing the number of eyes on their listings and increasing sales.

eBay recently added the option to filter by a 3-day guaranteed delivery which boosts the competitive advantage of sellers who offer this option even further.

This is how this filtering option looks on eBay search results:

eBay sellers have been increasingly criticizing eBay for lack of traffic to their listings so providing your buyers with 3-day guaranteed delivery is a great way to receive more traffic.

Your Reputation is Above All - Provide Top Notch Customer Service

As part of my job at CrazyLister, I get the opportunity to help many eBay sellers.

Customer service is almost always one of the first two subjects I discuss; I can’t stress enough the importance of providing amazing/excellent/awesome customer service.

In today’s eCommerce templates world, it’s getting harder and harder to compete with the likes of Amazon and other major brands. One hugely efficient (and cheap) way to distinguish yourself is by treating your customers the same way you’d like to be treated.

After handling over 100,000 customer service tickets, these are my top two learnings:

Always be gracious - This goes a long way with any customer. In most cases, customers will need support when they have a problem, remember that your job is to solve their problem in the most efficient manner to turn their pain into a relief.
Put your best people on the job - Business owners tend to think that a customer service position is a low pay, low-quality task. This cannot be further from the truth!
In today’s hyper-competitive eCommerce world, you need every bit of advantage you can get, and providing excellent customer service is a must to get you positive feedback and return customers. Consumer-minded, patient, and smart people must be the ones doing customer service for you.

eBay is Evolving - So Should You

Whether you’ve seen it or not, eBay has changed its seller experience significantly in the past couple of years. This often resulted in a lot of antagonism from sellers who’ve been selling on eBay for over 10-15 years and haven’t seen the changes as the years passed.

Some of these changes were too difficult for sellers to keep up with. The major one is, of course, the active content ban.

It’s no coincidence that the last couple of years have seen more changes to eBay’s platform than the 20 years prior combined. eBay has seen how Amazon took over and kept running away with increasing market share while other small marketplaces rise to challenge eBay’s place as one of the two dominant marketplaces (examples include: Etsy, Wish, Walmart, OfferUp).

eBay is shaking up its platform, which inevitably causes some sellers who hate change to raise their voice and complain. Eventually, the change is meant to keep eBay relevant which means sellers will continue to earn money via the eBay channel.

As a seller, you MUST pay attention to any policy change eBay releases and be proactive to comply. Other marketplaces are evolving on a regular basis, this is the reality, and as an online seller, you have to face it everywhere you sell.

Stand out with Professional Listing Design - Your Competitive Advantage

I mentioned at the beginning that I grew my own eBay business from zero to millions, but I didn’t tell you how.

From the get-go, I was missing three essentials things to stand out:

I didn’t have a large local market to sell to
I didn’t have the best delivery times
I didn’t have the lowest prices.

I was looking for my competitive edge, something that will convince buyers to choose us over the competition.

I noticed that most eBay listings looked like a mess. It was mostly because eBay’s platform required sellers to have coding and design skills to create professional-looking listings. I decided that optimizing my listings to look 100x better than the competition will help me stand out, and I started spending tons of time on studying the art and science of high converting design.

Eventually, I was outselling the competition even though my prices were 10-20% higher, all thanks to professional looking listings.

The point is that design conveys trust, authority, and professionalism of your business and it is one of the best ways to create a competitive advantage that will help you increase eBay sales.

After realizing that millions of online sellers share our pain, we went on to build CrazyLister, which became the leading eBay solution with over 100,000 users.

Here’s an example of a professional eBay listing created easily with CrazyLister: