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The vast majority of web users who buy things on eBay are customers. But as any successful eBay seller realises, they aren’t just buyers. You must remember that the customer is king, the key to maintaining a good feedback rating, and the key to ongoing business that can keep an eBay sales venture profitable. Cultivating ongoing relationships with satisfied buyers is the key to a sustainable business.

To those who sell on eBay to benefit nonprofit causes, customers are even more special: they are donors as well as buyers. They’re people who keep you going and make your activities possible. As anyone who has participated in one of eBay’s community forums can tell you, the internet is a great place to develop close relationships with individuals who share a common goal or interest, in other words, develop relationships with a wide online community.

On eBay and the internet, caring for and feeding donors is as important as it is in the offline world. eBay gives you several ways to maintain good relations with other members. The most important is eBay’s well-known feedback system, which rewards trustworthiness and punishes dishonesty.

You can also volunteer information that helps your donors providing them with the URLs of web sites they might like to visit, on eBay or elsewhere, or answering questions on the message boards. At the very least, you’ll gain the respect of your donors by responding quickly to e-mail inquiries, and making payment and shipping easy. It’s all about helping people to do the right thing.

Customer Support

If you’re affiliated with a charity, you already know about growing your donor base. It boils down to being nice to your donors: inviting them, feeding them, thanking them, and giving them special access and possibly other benefits.

On the web (and by extension, on eBay), nurturing donors is the same as providing a high-Ievel of customer service. But customer service on the Web is different than in other venues.

Nonprofits, like other organizations that sell on eBay or online, need to take into account the special way online consumers behave. In the traditional offline world, customer service is a matter of answering questions and solving problems with orders. Customer service representatives make themselves available to field questions and problems as they arise.

Customer service on the internet isn’t a matter of publishing a phone number or e-mail address and waiting for consumers to send you questions. Such basics are important, but it’s more a matter of making information proactively available to consumers. The customer is in charge on the internet, not the seller. Customers choose to view your items for sale or visit your web site; they choose to make a bid or a donation, or go elsewhere with their money.

Many eBay sellers who receive questions from prospective bidders answer those questions quickly. But they go a step further, also. They also publish the questions and answers as additions to their sales descriptions. This reduces the number of similar questions you receive, which saves you some work; it also raises the level of customer support you provide, which makes prospective bidders more likely to purchase from you.

When you receive a question from a bidder through eBay’s message system, you have the option of simply responding to the buyer privately, or adding the question and your response to the body of your sales description.