The Collectors Site

And really, I mean this more as a tip than any kind of rant. It might be best to think a little before submitting your Best Offer on items on eBay. I’ve said before there’s a certain threshold where I likely won’t even respond with a counter-offer (under 50% for me), but if you want a reasonable counteroffer it pays to make a strong first offer.

Take a $20 item with Best Offer.

If you offer me $10, I’m likely going to respond with a counteroffer of $16, possibly even $18, depending on factors mentioned below.

By the same token, if you offer me $15, I may very well accept without further negotiation.

I respond to all Best Offers manually. I do this because I have a good markup on all of my items, so while I do have standards for what I’ll take, they are subject to fluctuations depending on several factors:

• I’ll do a better price for you on 5 items than I would 1
• Maybe I’m having a bad sales week and open to lower offers or vice-versa, having a good one and less open to any offers
• If I was just offering an item at auction, I may be more willing to take a lower price if it’s in line with what my previous minimum bid had been
• By the same token, I want more for a somewhat fresh item in stock but am very willing to listen on items which have been sitting in my Store for a long time
• Also, if you have 0-10 feedback, I’m less likely to accept a low offer.

Those are just some of the factors I take into account on every offer I receive.

But one thing’s for sure, the lower it is A) the more likely you are to be outright rejected; B) the more likely my counter-offer is as high as reasonably possible because I have to anticipate a further counteroffer by you.

I moved my e-commerce blog posts over here somewhat recently because I found them overall too unrelated to my posts dealing specifically with collectibles. I knew I wouldn’t be the most active e-commerce blogger in the world, so I set up a weekly twitter import just to keep content fresh.

In the meantime I was lucky enough to be picked up as the first guest contributor to the ColderICE ecommerce blog. I’ve done two postings over at ColderICE so far, with more to come–any and all current and future postings by me on ColderICE.com can be found here.

What this means is I’ll probably be less active over here than even originally intended, so I’ve gone ahead and deleted my Twitter imports–I don’t think we need a blog composed mostly of that. If you want to follow me on Twitter you can find me here.

Also, look for any postings here to be more or less quick hits–in other words, a thought that takes more than Twitter’s 140 characters to express, but which isn’t involved enough for a posting over at ColderICE. As an example I’m going to do one right after I hit the publish button on this post.

Last week’s eBay Analyst Day certainly managed to keep the e-commerce bloggers busy, didn’t it? I followed the tweets of @scotwingo and @ebayinkblog for awhile before realizing I could log in myself to listen live, which I did in time to view a whole bunch of Weebles wobbling and listen to some guy from Boston drone on longer than I would have liked to finally draw quite obvious PayPal conclusions.

If you’re interested in where eBay’s going there’s plenty of good takes on it out there, but I want to point you to a couple of my favorite people, neither of whom are known for the now par for the course anti-eBay sentiment, and both of whom still regularly use the site.

John “ColderICE” Lawson has gone above and beyond as per usual with his post I AM MAD as HELL ~ A MUST Read Report: How To FIX eBay!!!. If you don’t know John, and frankly it’s much more likely you don’t know me as John is out there big time, he’s a eBay Platinum PowerSeller and eBay Certified Education Specialist–the ICE in his alter ego actually stands for Internet Commerce Education, which is what he’s been giving back through his ColderICE blog and various other activities very effectively since 2008.

John conducts several online interviews and he managed to grab ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo (yes, the one and the same @scotwingo from above) for a chat the day prior to Analyst Day. John’s Mad as Hell post includes the complete audio recording of that interview along with a very attractive pdf that transcribes the entire interview into a handy report. You can listen to it, read it, do both at once or either separately, the choice is yours. The report covers Scot Wingo’s ideas on what eBay should do, while John’s accompanying post covers his interpretation of what the eBay troops say is the actual plan.

Regarding that plan, we move next to Mitzi Swisher of Vintage Goodness. What I like about Mitzi’s breakdown, eBay Analyst Day-Any News for Vintage Sellers, is that it comes from the perspective of the vintage seller. Take a look around the rest of The Vintage List and Vintage Goodness and you’ll see that Mitzi sells vintage, writes about vintage, and celebrates vintage. Mitzi focuses on eBay’s new focus, the Secondary Market. She points out “I can see how the size of the “Collectible Vintage Pre-Owned” circle compares to the size of the “Outlet and Liquidation” circle,” and without benefit of the graphic I’ll just tell you, it’s tiny. Mitzi summarizes the point as follows:

There is a small bit of hope to be had though – first and foremost we are on the chart, even if we are just a small section down in the corner, and eBay does see the Vintage and Pre-Owned market as having the ability to increase from where it stands today. So they haven’t counted us out completely – and rightly so!

Mitzi goes on to question the decline in auctions as well as all of the advertising coming onto the site.

Finally, I found the complete Wall Street Journal article, eBay Retreats in Retailing by Geoffrey A. Fowler, pasted into the Movie Poster Forum, and found the following line very interesting:

EBay’s focus on its “secondary market” includes the used and vintage goods that the company is already known for selling, as well as clearance and out-of-season items.

As well as, hmmm. What do you think? If you take this line at face value and take Mitzi’s view that there’s hope because vintage made eBay’s chart then there might be every reason for traditional retailers to be mad as hell, but also for antiques and collectibles dealers to be optimistic.

Having listened to the portion of the original call featuring eBay CEO John Donahoe, my own opinion is that we may have hope, but that eBay is resting it’s future on the bigger chunk of that Secondary Market, the one which they define as including Out of Season, Outlet Inventory, Overstock/Returns, and Liquidation Inventory. In other words, and I apologize if this hits your niche, crap. More exactly, in my opinion, the crap which shouldn’t be the featured products but just a part of the draw. I have never and will never shop eBay for these items. Then again, perhaps I’m hopelessly out of touch because from the start I’ve viewed eBay as the place to buy the exact items highlighted in the smaller piece of eBay’s proposed pie: Collectible, Vintage, Pre-Owned.

But I wonder, maybe it’s not me who’s out of touch, as this line from the same Wall Street Journal article quoted above has me wondering what they could have possibly interpreted leading to this:

As part of its sharpened focus, eBay Wednesday sketched out changes to its marketplace to help bring back shoppers who have migrated to other sites.

That ain’t what I’m hearing.

An ex-eBay seller who is also a longtime subscriber to my newsletter wrote asking me about selling on Bonanzle. Specifically they asked “Do people actually use it?” Here’s my response:

Bonanzle is an exciting new site, really the buzz of the e-commerce world right now, though possibly a little too early to look for steady sales. Don’t get me wrong, I do have some, and I know others doing pretty well, but what I think is happening is that while sellers have found this site, buyers are just starting to–in many cases I believe buyers are helping to fill certain selling niches, but have yet to find their way into others. That will come in time.

This isn’t eBay ’97 where if you build it they automatically come–from what I can tell Bonanzle’s most successful sellers do a lot of off-site work to personally drive buyers to the site. The overall benefit to us is that if these buyers like Bonanzle it becomes their place to buy.

I was a pretty early adapter, signing on in July of last year with the reasoning, it’s free (then) and it takes up practically none of my time–I decided to give it to the New Year. Well, here I am still

Not that the current economy is going to help us, but I expect buyers on Bonanzle to grow throughout 2009 and I honestly expect to see substantial sales in advance of the Holiday season. Do I guarantee it, well no, but I do really think that it will happen.

Final analysis, I’d definitely recommend giving it a try. The learning curve is low, listings are easy to create, fees are very low with free listing fees and very reasonable final value fees, and the other sellers are extremely friendly and helpful. I didn’t get on eBay until 2000 myself, but from what I know the feel of this place may remind you of eBay ’97.

If you have any specific questions about the site, or about getting set up here feel free to let me know. Hope this helped out.

Thanks,Cliff

What do you think? How specifically would you answer the question, “Do people actually use it?” Thanks for reading –

You ever get one of these e-mails from a potential buyer, and I’m using the term potential quite loosely here:

I’d love to buy X item, but I’m just a poor college student and can’t afford $25. Will you take $5?

In place of poor college student feel free to replace with “but I’m on food stamps,” “but this is for a friend because there’s a picture of their mother inside,” or the most direct “but while I want it I can’t afford it.”

Look my first inclination with any of the above excuses except the last, and maybe the one about the mother’s pic, is that you’re lying to me. But that’s why I generally let these emails sit and answer them a few hours after receipt. I’ve got too much tact to call you a liar. In fact, by the time I reply I want to believe you’re telling me the truth.

Here’s my standard answer: I’m very sorry, but this is my full-time business. I’d be willing to consider an offer closer to my list price, but I really cannot go this low on any item without putting my business in jeopardy.

In reverse order from my being least offended to most, here’s how I feel about these:

Want it, can’t afford –> I’ve got a big list of things I want and can’t afford too, wanna swap?

It’s got a pic my friend’s mother –> Why doesn’t your friend log in and buy it? Maybe they’d actually be willing to pay me what it’s worth?

Poor college student –> Possibly include hints at places to find other sources for their subject online. I’m not advocating doing any research for the non-buyer, just point them to Google or if you know a site offhand let them know. Again, stress that this is your business–if they’re really college students they generally respect this. Finally, you’re in college, let’s use some resourcefulness here!

Food stamps –> This, and other cries of poverty, is actually the most common of these for me. You know, I’m really just dying to answer this by saying that you really should find better uses for your few spare dollars than old collectibles. I mean I’m all about people collecting, that’s very cool, but if buying a trading card from me is going to get your electricity cut off, then maybe you should think twice. I almost don’t want to sell to you, I’m going to kind of feel like a drug dealer if I do. Buy a meal or some clothes! You want to collect, hit a yard sale.

What bugs me most about any excuse involved when asking for a better price, is that you’re making a concerted effort to play on my emotions. True or untrue, you not only believe that your dilemma deserves a discount, but that by telling me about it you’re more likely to get one.

Uh uh. No matter how big a bastard this post might make me sound like, I A) do my best to believe you and B) empathize.

But if you’re going to attempt to play on my emotions to buy a movie card or a magazine back issue and think I’m going to cave in to persistence, you’re wrong. I’m going to wind up wondering why in your situation you need this item so bad, and I’m likely going to jump to some conclusions about you involving not having your priorities in order.

The best way to approach me about a discount or a price lower than I’m willing to go is to simply tell me you feel X item is worth $X. Now I’m never going to take $5 on $20, but if you want to start a dialogue about it you might get me down from $16 to $14.

There are right and wrong ways of doing this too and I’ll tell you the worst one right now. “It’s only worth $5. Look at it, it’s beat up and your price is too high even if it wasn’t.”

Now if you’re going to outright call me out on my prices I’m not going to mince words. Reply: Then why do you want it?

If you talk to me, rather than challenging me, I’ll explain to you why the price is what it is. I might tell just tell you it’s not too high, I might explain that my grading system is one of the strictest you’re going to find, heck, I might even tell you that I know it’s priced high, but that I’ve got too much into it on my end.

In the end, what I’m advocating, is simply holding off reply to those customer emails that really piss you off. If you tell the buyer off, there’s no way they’re buying from you. And I’m not going to say I convert all, or even a lot, of the buyer excuses above into sales, because I don’t, but if I’m nice and I turn 10% of them into sales, then I’m just that much better off.

Just don’t direct any of them to this post!

This was a fun one, and pretty long too–I’m actually surprised they published the entire thing, but glad they did. Drop for Me is a drop-shipping site, and I don’t drop ship, so why talk to me? Well, a lot of drop shippers sell through eBay and that’s something I know all about since I’ve been doing it for nearly nine years now (wow!).

While focusing on selling on eBay the interview also gave me a chance to talk about my specific niches and to speak on eBay from the perspective of a vintage seller.

If you’re at all curious about drop shipping you’re going to want to look into Drop for Me beyond my interview.  The site is run by one of my twitter buds, Joseph Yi, along with his partner, Jun Loayza.  If drop shipping interests you be sure to follow DropforMe on twitter as well as multi-faceted entrepreneur Joseph_Yi himself.

The Drop for Me interview is text-based, if you prefer to listen here’s a recent podcast I did as guest on the Auction Wally Show back on February 10th. The audio interview is also about eBay and selling vintage collectibles, though the focus is more on the collectibles here:

I was getting ready to write a pretty specific post on selling collectibles on eBay tonight, but as the idea developed in my mind this section grew from a preamble to a separate post. I don’t know if how I list on eBay would be of any benefit to a commodities seller, but that’s why this is The Collectors Site–this is my perspective as somebody selling vintage collectible items on eBay.

I’ve mentioned this a few times recently, but I’ll put it in print here–I look to turn items over quick on purchase through the auction format on eBay, if an item passes at auction I relist it as either a Fixed Price (FP) or Store Inventory Format (SIF) listing and am happy to let it sit until it does sell. I do this because the collectibles I deal in are keyword rich and I find it beneficial to hold a number of items in stock for shoppers looking to fill their collecting needs through those keywords.

To simplify that paragraph, Fredric March does lousy at auction for me, but there are Fredric March collectors, so if my eBay Store carries a quantity of Fredric March items, then I have the potential for a multiple item sale at prices higher than I use at auction (more on why those prices are higher to come).

Another way to go would be to simply take all of the items that pass at auction, collect them into one big lot and auction that the following week. This is the way to go if you’re not looking to carry any stock. I prefer to grow my stock in order to fulfill the Fredric March order outlined above.

Thus I sell in auction format, FP format and SIF format. Furthermore for FP and SIF items I also selectively utilize the Best Offer (BO) feature and Markdown Manager (MM) for sales.

The next post is going to directly deal with how I decide on the format I’m going to use and what goes into pricing strategy. For the rest of this post I want to get away from the how and focus on the why.

Basically, even with 7 different potential listing formats mentioned above (Auctions, FP, FP w/BO, FP w/MM, SIF, SIF w/BO, SIF w/MM) from the customer’s perspective it boils down to four options: Auction, Straight BIN, Making an Offer, Straight BIN on a Sales Priced item.

I’ll discuss auctions more in the follow-up, but for now let it suffice to say that I mostly use the format when A) I think an item has potential to fetch more than my instinct tells me it’s worth, and B) to provide a boost to my overall body of listings simply by utilizing the format. From the buyer’s perspective I believe they only enjoy the idea of the auction when the item is truly rare, otherwise they wonder why they have to wait to buy it.

I’ve found Best Offer to be a very popular feature with buyers. It brings a little of that old wheeling and dealing feeling to an otherwise flat eBay platform by incorporating the most common trade show and yard sale technique: asking for a deal. Most people who have had a connection with the world of antiques and collectibles prior to coming online are very comfortable with making an offer.

Back when I did baseball card shows I can remember the meekest, quietest customers–people who I would see weekly for years at a time who still couldn’t bring themselves to make eye contact and say hello–ask for a deal before making their purchase. It is simply a part of that world. And it translates great to eBay, where buyers of this sort are comfortable asking for a deal.

Best offer is also excellent for making sales to other dealers as well as to people who only buy their collectibles on eBay–they’ve often come to the site led by the general perception of eBay as the place to get a deal, so they’re not scared to ask for one.

Still I do sell many items with the Best Offer feature enabled for the full marked price. These are buyers who want the item and want it without any back and forth interaction. Perhaps in some cases they just want the item regardless of price, but in other cases they want it quick and do not wish to partake in any back and forth, give and take banter.

But what about the items that don’t sell, even if you think they should? Items in a Fixed Price format either with or without the Best Offer feature enabled?

The only real way we as eBay sellers have to gauge interest in such items is the Watcher count on the item. And dealing from far at the end of the long tail I have items that never even see a watcher. Let me add something before moving to the next strategy though:

Every item I have listed on eBay will eventually sell.

I know it will. I’m working on the confidence that my eye, inside my niches, will not make a mistake. If I like it, so will someone else. My job is to make the item available at a price that best suits both myself and the customer. Am I perfect? No, and I will make the occasional mistake buying, which directly contradicts what I just said, but the key is to beat the mistake. That’s when you’ll see me lot something together to dump it or take offers far below what I’ll normally take. Some items will sit for a long time, but I can say this about my eBay sales–I’ve never, not since 2000, sold any item at a loss.

So how to best move those stale items? The ideas mentioned above (lotting and accepting lowball offers) are the final step. Markdown Manager comes before them.

By placing items on sale through eBay’s Markdown Manager, and I’ve used it to create sales from anywhere between 10-40% off, you are allowing the buyers who are either too meek or too busy to make a Best Offer an opportunity to buy.

Let’s work with a $10 item that you have 30% to move on. So you’d take a $7 offer, but nobody is sending you that offer. Why not put it on sale? Yes, you’re removing the possibility of receiving $7.01-$10.00 for the item through your sale, but you’re making the item available for a specified period of time at an amount you are ordinarily happy to accept when someone is bold enough to suggest it to you.

As you might imagine by how I’ve put this, I will not use Markdown Manager early in the life of an item.

eBay offers us all of these tools to sell — neither Best Offer nor Markdown Manager cost anything to use. By utilizing them, as well as the three basic selling formats (Auction, FP, SIF), I feel you are doing your best in attempting to gain the attention of the customer (through format) and make the sale (through style).

Next up, the idea this post grew from–I was pricing out several old movie star postcards that passed at auction in both FP and SIF format. I always find myself shaking my head when I do this because I know the items will eventually sell, but the buyers have missed out on my best prices. So I plan to follow up in two parts: first, on the VintageMeld I’m going to do a post explaining to buyers how to get the best deal from me, then finally, over here on The Collectors Site I’m going to explain to sellers why that is.

Well, I said I’d be bitching here, this one’s minor, very minor in fact, but I thought it gave a pretty good illustration of one of several reasons why I prefer not to take checks or money orders:

If you don’t want to waste your color ink on me, please at least set your printer to print the entire document in black & white!

You’ll see there’s no item title, so now I’ve got to take the extra step of typing in the item number to locate the item and print out the invoice. It takes me 20 seconds, not the point though. It takes you less time to send it to me right.

I blotted out a couple of the digits on the item number here, but didn’t adjust the photo in any other way–after all, I admit this is a very minor infraction, no need for anybody to go looking the item up to ID the buyer.

Take this tiny inconvenience though and add it to the back and forth emails of the buyer requesting to send payment by mail and then waiting on the payment–which in this case arrived quick, but still took a week longer to pay then the majority of my instant payments take, and you can see why some sellers would prefer not to be bothered with paper payments.

An extra bonus in the time wasting department is that this particular payment is a money order, which my bank’s smart ATM won’t decipher, so it also neccesitates a trip inside during banking hours for deposit at a teller, but that’s not the buyer’s fault, it’s Bank of America’s.

I’m a little guy, I’m not turning down anybody’s money, but I’ve realized that there’s enough of an inconvenience involved here that while I cannot offer a paper payments option on eBay, I choose to not offer it on Bonanzle (where paper payments are allowed).

I’m choosing to think of this period as the phase-out for paper payments on eBay. Oh, we all know that they are officially banned, but it’s now common knowledge that they’re unofficially allowed. My requests for paper payments on eBay remain about the same as ever, the only difference being that the buyer cannot check out by themselves anymore. Up until last week at least all buyer’s asked first, but I finally had one who wrote requesting my address after pressing the Buy it Now button, working under the assumption that I’d take their check (I did).

So if eBay is really getting rid of paper payments, I say fine. And I initially applauded the “Don’t Tell, Please Ask” policy of non-solicitation of paper payments. But if it turns out that buyers aren’t getting that this is a phase-out period then I say either put the option back into the checkout flow or give the policy some sharper teeth. And by sharper teeth I mean better inform buyers that paper payments are no longer an option–not a call to punish sellers for accepting the requested form of payment.

In the meantime, please folks, treat me to some color ink–help me get you your order quickly and correctly.

Thanks, Cliff

Have you seen my new site? I’ve had several web sites of my own since 2002 and have always taken the do-it-yourself approach. My main site is an embarrassment of riches if you’re looking for entertainment inside the Way Back Machine. But I started that before blogging caught on and little by little figured out what I was doing. First I’d build pages completely reliant on Microsoft’s Front Page, then I’d find myself tinkering in the html view of FrontPage to fix things, and now I only work in that view. I’m very proud of all I’ve learned over the past seven years.

Do you have seven years?

For all my work and all of my pride in it, I’d never imagine I’d say this, but my new site, the VintageMeld, only born onto the web in December 2008, is my favorite of all my sites. Ooh, that hurt to say!

The VintageMeld

I was lucky enough to become acquainted with Scott Pooler of iBusinessLogic some time last year through twitter and I was smart enough to listen to him preach the benefits of WordPress. At first I kind of shrugged him off. After all, I have a WordPress blog attached to my main movie site and the thing is pretty hideous (though I didn’t recognize that at the time) and time consuming to work on. Well, some time passed, Bonanzle was born as a selling venue and I became one of the early sellers on the site last Summer. Scott, besides being a crack web designer, is a voice in the e-commerce industry as well, and so he checked out Bonanzle pretty early himself. We both liked it…a lot!

Scott created an offering that he announced in the Bonanzle forums for a Bonanzle based web store. Though I’m pretty sure I was the first to sign on, I believe A Night Owl was the first to show off a brand new Bonanzle based webstore. Scott’s offering fit my budget, his design blew me away, his ability to listen and care about what input I had really impressed me.

Since I’m busy with a million and one things online, it took a little while for me to get together with Scott and complete my site, the VintageMeld, but it never failed, if too much time passed there was a good chance I’d see Scott’s face pop up on a Google chat…sometimes as early as 5 am! Once the VintageMeld was launched, Scott was very quick to respond to any requests I had for tinkering–and I had quite a few! Thank you, Scott Pooler of iBusinessLogic for being so patient with me.

Scott and iBusinessLogic are really pushing hard to create many more Bonanzle based websites in 2009. He has recently launched a new site of his own, Bonanzle Webstore Web Site Development, and is in the process of creating an amazing bargain for Bonanzle users.

Let me just say this–I’ve used WordPress since 2005 myself, but I never really used it right until Scott trained me (oh yeah, he does that too!). The design was something I could never do and it alone was worth every penny I paid to iBusinessLogic. The lessons in working the backend of WordPress have been invaluable–I relaunched this site, The Collectors Site, on the WordPress platform myself largely because Scott’s teachings created a comfort zone for me. Now The Collectors Site isn’t any VintageMeld, but this works for me.

Since WordPress is the platform for these sites/shops there are many further customizations iBusinessLogic can make for you. For instance, I believe my Bonanzle based webstore is unique in that the VintageMeld is also an eBay based webstore. Yes, that’s right, the VintageMeld displays both fixed price listings from Bonanzle as well as auction listings from eBay–all in one place!

If you’re a Bonanzle seller on a budget, I really can’t recommend Scott Pooler and iBusinessLogic highly enough. And with the new deals, well you really at least ought to do your business the service of exploring Scott’s new Bonanzle Webstore site. Don’t be afraid to ask questions either, you will be treated with respect and I found out personally that even the dumbest questions aren’t treated as dumb by iBusinessLogic.

I have to admit I initially got myself super-psyched up for John “ColderICE” Lawson’s interview with “Start a Business Backwards” coach Dwight Miller for one reason: I missed the live airing and John does a hell of a job promoting his interviews, so my anticipation grew by the day as I waited for it to be posted to his colderICE blog. All right, there was another reason, I had tremendously enjoyed John’s previous interview with the same Dwight Miller, so I knew this was going to be good.

You can find both parts of the latest Dwight Miller interview on colderICE’s site:
Part 1
Part 2

I sell vintage collectibles, so why was I so pumped to listen to advice from a guy who flipped a business to a Fortune 100 company? Because this stuff always tends to apply across the business spectrum, so what I’m going to do is use this post to discuss Dwight Miller’s ideas and how they apply to me…and quite possibly you.

I believe Dwight brushed upon the idea of dating your customers in his first interveiw with John, but he expanded upon the idea here. The concept is simple really, but worth being heard because we small business people do tend to get a little self-absorbed at times–it’s only natural when you’re working alone all day, don’t sweat it!

The date is all about building trust. There aren’t a lot of sellers in my niches, though there are some, but I’ll still talk about one of them freely here. I’ll use magazine back issues.

Okay, so Dwight says we’ve first got to flirt with our customer to get their attention. How do I do that? I give more than the other guy before a purchase is even made. While many competitors and casual sellers market their back issues with simply the title and date of the magazine along with an image of the cover I go beyond that to also tell my potential customers what is inside the magazine. My extra keywords help capture the customers attention. Other ideas for all collectible niches on eBay are more and better photos, and to tell more of a story with your description–generally old items are neat because there is a history to them. The item is in your possession, you likely know more about it than most, if not all, of your potential customers. Even if you just tell them how neat you think the item is, or how it touched you personally, you give your potential customers a easier route to connecting with you.

Have nothing more to say? Well, another way to make your items stand out is paying the extra fees for a bold or highlighted listing, or any other upgrade, these upgrades can make your item special even before the potential customer is on the listing page itself.

This idea also goes hand in hand with another point Dwight stressed throughout the broadcast, “everybody pays for a customer.” Whether it’s through a loss leader, or as in my last example, a fee for an enhanced eBay listing, or maybe your Google Adwords bill, we’re all making a financial sacrifice in some way or another to drive the customer towards the sale. I’m paying even with the extra time I take to provide the extra information about magazine contents on the listing page. If you’re not making some sacrifice towards your sales offering, whether it be financial or simply a matter of the clock, you’re not going to position yourself for the better opportunity for the sale.

If you compose a bare bones listing, chances are the collector will pay more to buy from me … and I’ll be the one buying from you looking to make money off the collector.

So now I’ve enticed the customer into my special listing, and they are generous enough to trust me enough to click the Buy it Now button. What’s the key thing to do after the sale. Here’s one I managed to stay ahead of the curve on as well: thank them.

I’ve got 100% positive feedback on eBay with 9 years on the site. My DSR numbers are consistently 4.8 and above, actually I’ve usually got more 4.9s and 5.0s than I do 4.8s. I’m not perfect. I screw up, probably as much as you do. How do I continue to appear perfect in our little eBay world.

The most common words I say to a customer are thank you and I’m sorry.

That’s it. The first words of my invoice are “thank you,” I send a thank you email once payment is received, my business card says “thank you” on the top line on back. Actually I just ordered more cards tonight and one of the changes I made to them was to increase the font on the words “thank you.”

You won’t be saying “I’m sorry,” as often as you are, “thank you,” but when you do need to say it, recognize it and do it. There was perhaps nothing I agreed with more in this entire interview than the idea of humbling yourself to the customer and admitting you’ve made a mistake. I have had customers that I’d swear were absolutely insane (don’t tell them that), but a little sweetening of my emails with some humble pie, sometimes even a follow-up if I’m still not comfortable with their response and I’ve turned them into repeat customers. My favorite line Dwight delivered during the entire hour was in response to worrying about getting burned in such a situation: “That’s the cost of doing business.” That’s it. The chargebacks, the negative feedbacks, the PayPal holds, they’re going to happen and they’re going to happen to you. It’s not a perfect world.

Just today I received an email from a customer upset because she checked the tracking info on her package and it had said delivery was refused–she said it was not. The first thing I did? Well, one, I took for granted that this was the truth, and two, I sent this email back:

Very sorry it didn’t get to you yet–yes, this is kind of strange since the USPS tracking claims delivery was attempted at 6:30 this morning? Nothing unusual about the packaging, should be just a 10×13 brown envelope with hard backing. My info from the PayPal shipping label says that it was sent to:

(I’ve removed the customer’s address)

Is this correct? If so, and you have the time to do so, you may want to try calling your local post office this afternoon–if delivery was attempted this morning, it should still be there–maybe they can grab it before it heads back and attempt delivery again tomorrow. I’m wondering if this is just some kind of glitch in their system and it winds up being delivered tomorrow anyway (because again, that tracking info is kind of strange).

If it heads back to me I’ll let you know, but please do confirm that address for me–we’ll just have to try again.

Thank you, and again, my apologies for any confusion.

Thanks,Cliff

A little later today the customer wrote back thanking me for being so kind and to let me know the package was indeed delivered today. Now I don’t know if they’re going to turn into a repeat customer, but I do know I didn’t hurt my chances any by my reply.

Where I found Dwight Miller excelling throughout this interview was in his explanation of the emotions behind these simple steps to success. In this case, we’re in a world where so many people, so many companies, don’t bother with that thank you or I’m sorry, so if you’re the exception who types out these words then you’ve taken a major step towards building further trust with your customer…with taking the relationship to the next level, intimacy.

Beyond the thank you, talk to your customers more. Ask if they’re looking for anything else (check, lots of want lists saved here), ask how else you can serve them. Make it clear that you don’t take their business for granted. Dwight claims you can never talk to your customers too much–write your list regularly and often, but don’t always sell to them when you do. Deliver content.

I relate that to myself this way. I have informational sites for each of my niches. I also have a newsletter. Now I will admit I could send that newsletter more often than I do, but truthfully I don’t because it is a tool for delivering content. I build my informational site throughout the month and I send that content to my subscribers who likely haven’t bumped into it on my sites for themselves yet. Basically it’s a road map to the new content which I’ve created already anyway. I sprinkle links to sales listings into the newsletter (and on the sites), but I only ask for business directly once. I’m delivering 100% original content, useful content–the idea is the customer gets excited by that content, because they are extremely targeted, and it makes them want to buy.

Dwight Miller talked about so much more, but I think this piece will be best served by just hopping forward to the next step in the process of our date/relationship with our customers. I don’t currently give my customers an outlet to this portion of the relationship, but I’m working on it. For small businesses like us, the trust is taken to a new level by convincing them to buy from our own web sites.

When we make a sale on eBay, Amazon or any other site we rent space from, part of our investment, of what we pay to acquire our customer, is our space on that site. Why are we paying for it? Because the customer is trusting enough in eBay or Amazon’s brand to overlook us. They assume if we’re on one of those sites then we will fulfill the pledge of the site. They’ve placed their trust #1 with the brand name web site and #2 with you or I.

But once they’ve bought from us a couple of times, once we’ve made that impression and brought them back for more that trust can and has shifted some. Dwight Miller strongly feels that sites such as eBay should be used solely as a customer acquisition tool. The only ways to make more money are to sell more or reduce expenses–no better way to reduce expenses than move the customer from eBay’s platform to your own. How do you move your repeat customer from eBay to your site?

Ask them, “Did you know I have my own site?” Dwight says chances are, they don’t, and more often than not the move is that simple. Create transparency by directly telling your customers, “You help my business by buying from my site and not eBay.” Of course if your business benefits, the buyer sees benefits as well.

I’m hoping to open a new independant shop myself within the next couple of months. Luckily I’ve had the experience of growing such a store myself in the past, so I have a pretty good clue how to get customers to make the move with little actual effort. 1) Business card inserts in packages; 2) E-mail signature; 3) Pushing the new store on my informational sites whose visitors include some of my best and most regular customers.

Oh, there was so much more, but I think the essay above ties together the basics of Dwight Miller’s main points. Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the Dwight Miller interview on ColderICE.com and listen carefully for a really neat way to use twitter to actually make money.