Starting An Ebay Business At Home – 5 Tips To Help You Be Successful

The Internet makes starting your own business and making money online incredibly easy and cheap. I have selected 5 choice tips to help and inspire you to achieve your business goals. Each one of these tips could be a separate report in itself. There are many different factors that lead to online business success, such as business planning, understanding shopping carts and payment processors, researching your products, suppliers and your target customers. Marketing and driving traffic all play a part as does customer service. Here is today’s 5-pack:
Tip #1 Credibility is everything when conducting online ecommerce. If it is possible for credibility to be even more important, then it is on auction sites, especially eBay. Nothing destroys your credibility quicker than if you use unprofessional graphics on your website. That first impression created by your website is incredibly important and it does not take much to turn a seemingly terrible graphic into something that looks neat, clean and professional, but if you don’t have the ability to modify the graphics yourself, either use minimal to no graphics and rely only on the design space of the text or hire a professional graphic artist.
Tip 2 Behind the scenes, the shopping cart doesn’t handle the actual transaction, but acts as a front-end to gather data on customer selections. It then passes on its information to a payment gateway via a secure web page. The customer’s credit card is verified, and the payment directed to your account. Once the payment is made, the transaction details are relayed back to the shopping cart, which then tells the buyers how their order will be fulfilled if their payment was accepted.
Tip #3 Don’t leave your email address on your website; it will be harvested by spam bots. Use a “Help Desk” system. Your customers have to register first and then create a support ticket. They immediately get an automated response explaining that their customer service issue is logged, gives them a tracking ticket number and explains that a customer service representative will respond shortly. This appears very professional to a customer and greatly increases your credibility. This is especially effective when you respond in a timely fashion. When using a help desk, you should always tell the customer about how long to wait before receiving reply. A help desk is generally easy to install as most hosting accounts include automatic installation free with your account.
Tip #4 Drop shipping is a service that used to be offered by wholesale companies to their reseller customers. Drop shipping simply means that the product distributor stores its inventory in its warehouse. When you sell a product, you then send payment to the drop ship company, and it, in turn, sends the product under your business name to your customer. Your customer is never directly aware of the drop shipper. This is called “blind drop shipping.” This can be a solution to the problem of having to stock inventory either on the premises of your residence or renting a storage space. It also solves the problem of shipping and handling, and if your drop shipper is a true professional, then this will also solve the problem of returns and replacements.
Tip #5 One key factor that will contribute to the success of your ecommerce, home business site is traffic. Product sourcing alone is not enough. Although there are numerous ways to develop a flow of traffic, if you cannot get potential customers interested in your products to your site, you will not make money. In other words you need targeted traffic. Possibly the most economical traffic development tool at your disposal is the search engines–Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, to name the big three. I’m not suggesting that the search engines be your only strategy for bringing people to your site, but with proper consideration, the search engines can be harnessed to work very well in your favor.
Source http://uknewsreporter.co.uk/