The Ups and Downs.
The downside of store newsletters is this: they're expensive. A basic, $15.95 per month store only comes with 100 emails, while $49.95 comes with 1000. Even the $499.95 anchor store only comes with 4000! Extra emails for all stores cost 1 cent each. That's $1 per hundred extra emails. If your mailing list has a significant number of people on it, then that'll get really expensive, really fast.

Surprisingly, though, it can often be worth it, despite the cost. It's very rare to send out a newsletter to a mailing list of a hundred and not get at least one sale, and you'll often get three or four, even to small lists.

Measure Your Success.
Each time you send an email, eBay produces a report telling you how well that email did. You can view these reports on the 'Email Marketing' page by clicking the subject line of an email you sent.

This report will show how many people received your email, how many opened it, the number of clicks it generated on your items and your store, and the number of bids and Buy it Now purchases that resulted from the email. Some of the numbers might be too low, though, as many people use email software that displays email in plain text format and so stops eBay from collecting statistics. Also, you will notice that you'll have more success if you send out emails regularly, as people will start to expect them, and react in a more open way - don't expect the Earth from your first email.

By now, you're probably getting pretty good at selling on eBay - isn't it nice to have all those satisfied customers? Not to mention the money, However well you're doing, though, there's always room for improvement. The next email will give you ten tips for being an even better seller.

10 Tips for Being a Better Seller.
If you've got this far, you've got the basics of eBay. There are a few things left, though, that you might not have thought of trying. Quite a few of these tips go against the advice many give for eBay selling - some are a little risky and some are just odd. They're all worth a try, though, and I'm sure you'll find at least some you want to keep using.

1. Keep more records. It might sound time consuming, but you'll actually find it easier in the long run - less time spent trying to figure out which item that cheque you got this morning is for.

2. Post without payment. Don't even wait for payment to clear! That might sound risky, but it'll mean that the buyers get their items more quickly - for small items, you might find it worth the occasional loss to give such quick service.

3. Post every day. Once you start shifting a high volume of items, go and post them every day - again, they'll get there more quickly, making your customers very happy. The best way to do this is if you have items small enough to drop in a postbox.

4. Encourage an auction mentality. Don't have a Buy it Now price, and make it very clear when it's the last or only stock you'll be getting in. Always refer to winning bidders as 'winners'.

5. Mention every defect your item has. Now why would you do that, you might ask? The answer is that it builds credibility: the small hit you take from the slight flaws is nothing compared to the big boost in trust you get for admitting it. People bid more when they trust the seller.

6. Say how you got the item. Don't be afraid to go off on a tangent and give all sorts of fun details of how you got hold of what you're selling - it gives your auction character and, again, builds trust.

7. Accept odd payment methods. Sooner or later you're going to get a buyer who wants to pay by sending cash in an envelope, or something equally unusual. Why not let them? Be flexible.

8. Don't be afraid to sell low. Let the occasional item go for a really low price to a good buyer. You might only just break even on the item, but the person who got that bargain will be back again and again.

9. Give free shipping for a certain number of orders, or orders over a certain amount. People might buy something else they don't want as much, just to get the free shipping. (Amazon use this strategy to great effect).

10. Ship worldwide. Take the time to investigate the prices, and be nice to international customers - imagine how much you're expanding your market. That's not to mention the effect of people bidding highly for items that are rare in their country.

Another way to make it easier is to be a better seller is to use some of the many third party eBay tools that are available. The next email will take a look at a selection of tools you might find useful.

A Look at Third Party eBay Tools.
There are plenty of companies out there offering third party eBay tools. Most of them are web-based instead of downloadable, so you pay a monthly fee instead of just buying the software. But do you know what these sites can do for you? It can be hard to get to grips with what's out there using a search engine, so here's a quick rundown of the key players.

Andale (www.andale.com).
Andale offer lots of small products instead of one solution that does everything: you can take your pick from a lister, image hosting, counters, analysers, a gallery, a checkout and an email manager. The price plans are a bit of a maze, but quite reasonable as long as you don't go and use everything.

Andale's real claim to fame is that they've been doing it for so long - they're not some fly-by-night organisation, and many eBay sellers have been using their free counters for absolutely years. They also have a reputation for being very responsive to customers, and will often talk to you directly on their forums and implement any suggestions you might have for improving their software.

Vendio (www.vendio.com).
Vendio offer two editions of their software, Sales Manager: a Merchandising edition and an Inventory edition. The difference between the two is that the Merchandising edition is designed to make it easier to list individual auctions, while the Inventory edition is for sellers who sell many of the same item. They offer a pay-as-you go price of 10c per auction.

They also offer software called Tickets Manager, special software for people who sell lots of tickets on eBay - an odd product to have, but useful if you happen to sell tickets. Other services offered by Vendio include web and image hosting, fancy Flash galleries of your products for your listings, and stores.

ChannelAdvisor (www.channeladvisor.com).
ChannelAdvisor offer their software in three versions: Enterprise, Merchant and Pro. Enterprise and Merchant are both designed for very big businesses, though, and the chances are that the Pro version does everything you'd want. ChannelAdvisor is popular among sellers who want a solution that they know is used and trusted on a very large scale by enterprise-level customers.

It offers all the standard bulk listing and inventory features, as well as the unique feature of being able to create auctions from an Excel spreadsheet of your inventory. The cost is high, though, at $29.95 per month.

And Many, Many More.

eBay maintain a comprehensive directory of third-party software, which you can browse through anytime you have a few days to kill. You can look either for complete solutions or for each part of what you want individually - the choice is so daunting that there's bound to be something out there for you. You can look at their directory at http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SolutionsDirectory.

Once your items have sold and you're about to ship them, you might be a little nervous about whether you can trust your buyer. Our next email will give you a few tips for spotting problem buyers before you send them anything.

Tips for "Knowing Your eBay Buyer" Before You Ship.
Before you send anything to that buyer, you might want to get to know them, especially if you're selling them a high-ticket item that you couldn't afford to lose. Even if the buyer has paid, the PayPal transaction could still end up being reversed, leaving you out of pocket. So how do you figure out if you can trust your buyer?

Look at their feedback for others. Go to their feedback page and click 'Left for Others'. If they leave a lot of negatives for their sellers, then you should try to get away from them as fast as you can - if you do deal with them, make sure not to leave your feedback first. You should consider a negative someone has left to be just as bad as a negative left for them.

Look at feedback from sellers. Click 'From Sellers'. You might find that they have more complaints from sellers than from buyers - or, on the other hand, it might be the other way around. Some people really are just better at selling than buying, or vice versa.

Pay attention to bid retractions. If they have a high number of bid retractions, you should regard this as a red flag that something might be wrong.

See what else they've bought. When someone goes from buying items worth $1 to suddenly buying something worth $1,000, you might want to be a little suspicious of them.

See what they're bidding on now. If they've never shown any interest in your kind of item before, and now suddenly they're bidding on lots of them, then that's cause for concern. You should also be suspicious of someone who seems to be spending a lot of money all at once - few buyers have thousands at a time to blow on eBay.

Check their ID history. People who've changed their ID are often trying to get away from someone who's trying to find them. This is another warning sign - be especially wary of someone who changed their ID very recently.

Be nice to new buyers. Genuine new buyers will probably have a name ending in a number and a feedback score of 0 - don't always think these people are fraudsters. Somewhat counter-intuitively, people trying to commit fraud will almost never do it when they have a feedback score of 0 - they'll think it's too obvious. New buyers often have problems with being inexperienced on eBay, however, and you might have to guide them through things like opening a PayPal account.

Email them! If you want to get to know your eBay buyer, why not have a little chat with them about the item, what they plan to do with it? Say that how you know they're going to love it, and ask if there's anything else you can do for them. Few buyers who seem chatty and nice will turn out not to be in the end.

If you keep having trouble with buyers you don't want winning your high-value auctions at the last second, you might want to use eBay's 'pre-approved buyer' function. The next email will show you how.

How to Use eBay's "Pre-Approved Buyer" Function.
For sellers who constantly have to put up with bid snipers, non-paying bidders and other anti-social, timewasting buyers, eBay's 'pre-approved buyer' feature is a godsend.

Pre-approving buyers lets you choose in advance who you're going to allow to bid: not by banning people you don't want, but by explicitly allowing people you do want. Anyone who is not on the pre-approved list will have to email you and ask you to let them bid.

While that might sound great, it's only really a good idea to do it on very, very high value items. After all, half the point of eBay is that it's such an open marketplace - if you're going to restrict bidding to a few people, why not just email them to offer the item?

Most buyers will be very upset if they come across an item that they need to be pre-approved to bid in. They almost certainly won't have heard of the rule before, and they'll think this 'new feature' (it must be new if they've never heard of it, right?) is absolutely terrible. The one time I required pre-approval for an item, someone actually wrote to eBay to complain about the auction's format - as if eBay had nothing to do with letting me list that way! The chances are that almost no-one will ever email you asking to be included in the auction - they'll go somewhere else instead.

Of course, it'd be better if you could just require that bidders have a minimum feedback level, but then that might overly restrict the choices of new buyers, and make them less likely to buy anything to begin with. There's a delicate balance at play between trust and openness, and pre-approval tends to violate it. If one of your regular buyers wants to bid on your item only to find out they weren't pre-approved, the chances are they'll be more than a little offended at your lack of trust.

The only situations in which you might find an advantage in pre-approving bidders are if your auctions get consistently disrupted. Jokers sometimes bid millions because they think it's funny, or people bid high and then don't pay as a protest against whatever you're selling - this is a pain to deal with. Requiring approval makes sense on very high-ticket items simply because it shows the buyer is serious about wanting to buy.

Before you can restrict an item to pre-approved buyers, you have to list it and get an item number. You can then set up pre-approved bidding on this page: http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?PreApproveBidders. From there on, it's a simple process - just type the usernames of the people whose bids you want to accept, and then keep checking your email.

Remember, though, that you don't need to restrict your auction to pre-approved bidders to keep people you don't like from bidding on your auctions. You can simply cancel these buyers' bids when they appear, and then use eBay's 'block bidder' function to ban them from bidding on any of your auctions again. Edit your block list here: http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?bidderblocklogin.

In the next page, we'll take a look at whether your eBay design is as effective as it could be.

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