Growing a Customer Base Using eBay
Building a customer base using eBay is not that easy to do if you are only using eBay’s tools.
In the North American market there has been a push from the top eBay sellers to broaden their businesses by selling in other marketplaces (like Amazon, Overstock etc) and to build their own ecommerce storefronts.
eBay fees can be expensive, especially in product verticals that become more and more competitive (DVDs, Electronics come to mind).
So :
- how do you keep your eBay customers?
- How yo you make them come back?
- Do you ‘own’ them, or does eBay?
I will explain exactly what we do to retain and grow our customers from eBay now.
You need to start thinking about marketing your business to your customers, and making every effort to keep them. eBay owns the eBay customer. According to eBay’s terms and conditions you cannot market another website that sells the same product that you have in an auction, until the purchasing transaction is complete.
This is an important thing to remember!
Also of note, we at NO POINT on our eBay sales process or in our listings ask people to subscribe to our store or RSS feed. We would much rather they subscribe to our email list for our web store.
It might be easier to break this down into points of contact with the customer, and what we do as a business to make the most of these contacts for our short term and long term benefit.
Contact Point 1 : eBay sale is presented to the customer in the form of a eBay auction or store listing
In our auction and product listings on eBay we are not allowed to send the customer to our external online shop. Rather we encourage them to either:
- Buy from us so we can start and complete a transaction with them and/or
- Hope they search online for our clearly marked Brands and model information.
As we have our own unique brands and models of items this certainly helps. Often we find customers see our eBay listings, then search for the product name in Google to find our store.
What can you do to make people look outside of eBay?
- Promote the fact you retail nationally
- Mention the specific brands you carry on your listing
This may encourage the customer to try Google to find more information about your product…
Contact Point 2 : Customer Wins an eBay Auction (and enters our checkout system)
Great! Now we have the ability to email the customer! At this point the customer is ‘committed to sale’ according to eBay’s terms and conditions. We don’t want to push the issue, so in our ‘Winning Buyer Notification’ email that we send we do no include our website URL.
We use 3rd party software called ChannelAdvisor to handle our inventory, listings and multiple selling channel strategy. It redirects eBay sales through our own checkout, at which point we ask the customer if they would like to subscribe to our newsletter (we add a short marketing spiel about ‘2000+ products available online!’ or something to that effect). This generates a good number of signups (over 50% of sales I think)
Contact Point 3 : Customer Pays For Item
This is where the marketing effort has to be a little better on your part. The customer has paid. The financial aspect of the transaction is complete and you are about to ship the product. As the sale is complete we now include a small marketing message and/or our ecommerce store URL in the footer of our further correspondence.
This is all about branding, and call to action. We don’t think we get too many visitors to our stores from customer at this specific point, but it starts to reinforce the message that we sell outside of eBay as well.
Contact Point 4 : Shipping the item to the customer
This is where it counts. We include a nice thank you letter (detailing our thanks for the purchase, our commitments to customer service and product quality, and a link to our returns policy - we include brand and URL on this letter). We also include an invoice for our customer (with brand and website URL)
Then, we insert an advertisement into the shipment. This may be a special call to offer “FREE shipping on your next www.storename.com.au purchase!’, or a newsletter style format with some monthly specials listed with attractive prices.
This generates a lot of direct traffic to our sites.
Summary
Make each and every contact with your customer an effective one. Display your brand, where possible encourage them to join your mailing list for ‘future specials and product discounts’. Communicate effectively and professionally with them.
And build that mailing list! It is worth $$$$ to you!
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