Having plenty of (good) feedback helps you as an eBay seller in so many ways: it boosts your visibility, gives higher credence to your reputation, encourages other buyers to purchase from you and keeps your account in good health. FeedbackExpress has these 12 tips you can start using right away to improve your eBay feedback rating.
1. Offer Free Shipping
Unless you’re selling a super niche product with little to no competition, you’ll need a way to stand out from the crowd and offering free shipping is one of the easiest ways of doing that.
But it also has the parallel effect of reducing a buyer’s gripes should anything go wrong. After all, how many times have you heard of an upset shopper saying, “And their shipping cost too much, too!”?
2. If You Don’t Have Free Shipping, Be Upfront about Shipping Fees
All buyers understand there’s no such thing as free shipping, as the cost has to surface somewhere. If it’s not massaged into the product price, it’ll appear as a separate charge.
Being upfront and transparent about this not only helps curry favour with buyers, but it also improves your feedback rating. Shipping and handling charges is one of the criteria buyers can rate you on, and it’s one of the easiest ways you can get a full five stars on.
3. Be Clear with Shipping and Dispatch Times
In today’s world, buyers expect to get their purchases almost immediately. What they don’t have a lot of tolerance for is sitting around and waiting with no explanation for why something is late.
Ideally, you’d want to offer fast shipping and dispatch times and have it work out every single time. But humans are prone to error and it’s inevitable you’ll encounter problems and inefficiencies along the way. To combat this, write something on your product pages along the lines of, “We dispatch within X time. Based on experience, typical arrival times are usual (this) for (city).”
4. Describe Products Accurately
Products sold on eBay range from brand new to really worn. That’s okay because sometimes buyers value cost savings over an item’s condition. The key to getting a good feedback rating is to be accurate with your product descriptions. If a book is missing the dust jacket or if there are scratches on the back of a phone, write that so there are no surprises.
5. Be Fast with Responses
There’s no excuse for taking days and days to respond to a buyer’s question, not with all the options and tools available to you. If you’re not responding within 24 hours (excluding weekends), you’re taking too long, in the eyes of both eBay and the buyer.
Plus, there are other sellers who respond right away and customers will start moving to them. If you’re a small seller, put your phone number down so buyers can contact you directly. If you’re on the larger side, put your business number down, ensuring an employee is there to answer the call.
6. Make Things Easier with eBay’s Automated Feedback Reminder
A lot of buyers feel the purchasing process is over once they return their product, not realizing how important it is for you to get feedback. Luckily, eBay has a system in place that’ll send a message to buyers after one month, asking them to leave feedback (if they haven’t done so).
7. Get Unwarranted Negative Feedback Removed
Negative feedback harms your overall rating, so try and get it removed if it violates eBay’s feedback policies. Violations include things like abusive feedback, using profane language and/or including personal or revealing information.
8. Tackle Negative Feedback Head-on
If negative feedback is in accordance with eBay’s feedback policies, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be content with it staying up. Neutralizing it is the far better option.
While you may not be able to get it removed, you can respond to it and give your side of the story, helping future buyers understand the whole picture.
9. Try and Get Negative Feedback Revised, If Possible
There’s a happy middle ground between getting negative feedback removed and neutralizing it, and that’s convincing the buyer to revise their original feedback.
For example, if you’re able to offer them something (e.g. cash rebate, credit, etc.) that makes them happier and solves the problem, they’ll be able to change their feedback from negative to positive so don’t forget to ask them to do so.
10. Pause and Reassess if the Negative Feedback Builds Up
If you’re noticing a trend where certain products are triggering negative feedback regularly, then take a brief pause on selling those items so your positive feedback-generating items can take over.
While you’re on this hiatus, take the time to examine why those particular products are receiving such negative feedback (e.g. product condition, shipping time, etc.) and change things to prevent negative feedback in the future.
11. Prevent Negative Feedback Before It Happens
If a buyer has a bad experience, they’ll be itching to tell the whole world about it, even if what they really want is for you to make things right. Take advantage of that instinct by making it clear that you’ll help buyers immediately if they reach out and contact you first, instead of hurrying to leave negative feedback.
12. Create Another Account
This should only be used as a last-ditch effort when things have snowballed out of control. If your account has accumulated too much negative feedback and you find it impossible to get past it, create another account.
There are a couple things to keep in mind, though. The first and most important one is you can’t create a new account if your old/current one is under suspension. The second is that when you start anew, you’ll have to work hard at getting yourself noticed in a very competitive landscape.
Final Thoughts
What if we told you there was a magical tool out there that could instantly boost your chances of receiving feedback from buyers, and the good kind, too? That tool isn’t magic because it actually exists, and it’s called FeedbackExpress. When you automate the feedback process, you give yourself every advantage possible to ranking higher, getting better product visibility and better seller metrics. Instead of letting your competitors get those reviews, take them for yourself by signing up now and starting off with a 14 day free trial.
