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There is a well known fact about marketing that you can use to help you in your eBay business.
The fundamental fact about marketing I'm talking about is that it is easier and cheaper to sell your products to your existing customers who have bought from you before.
If you think about it, eBay is actually designed to enable you to sell products to people haven't bought from you before. eBay has put very little effort into encouraging buyers to buy from the same sellers over and over again. They do provide a favourite sellers list, but that's about it.
In the retail world, people tend to go back to where they bought before, provided that they had a good experience. Think about your own buying habits. Do you tend to buy your groceries from the same supermarket each week? Do you tend to go to the same hairdresser/barber each time you need a haircut? How about restaurants or take-aways, do you find yourself going back to the same ones?
We are creatures of habit. We find familiarity comforting. Unless we experience particularly bad service or poor value for money, whenever we want to buy we tend to give repeat business to the suppliers we've used before.
So, if on eBay you give your customers exceptional value for money and excellent service, the next time they need a product that you sell, they will have no reason to go to someone else. They know what to expect from you, but they don't know what to expect from someone else. They will feel more comfortable buying from you than from someone that they have no experience of. And if you have given good service and value for money, they will want to reward you by giving you more of their custom.
Indeed, once they have bought something from you, and they are satisfied with you and your product, they will have the confidence to spend MORE money with you on your other, more expensive, products.
So the "secret", if you can call it that, is that you should build a list of your happy eBay customers. This is effectively a database of people who have already bought from you and who will be happy to buy from you again because you provide exceptional value for money and excellent service.
Internet marketers use this principle all the time. They sell a cheap (even free) but GOOD QUALITY front-end product first to get as many people on to their list as possible. They then sell higher and higher priced back-end products to these same people.
The trick is that ideally these back-end products must be related to the front-end product, so that they will be of interest to those existing customers.
There is good profit in the idea of marketing back-end products for two reasons. Firstly, you can market these products direct to your existing customers (because you now have their contact details) without having to pay eBay's listing and final valuation fees, so your costs are lower. And secondly, these back-end products can be higher priced and so have higher profits.
For this system to work best, you will need a line of connected products of increasing value. Your growing list of happy customers provides you with your very own market making your business more viable and increasing your financial security.
Using this system means that you aren't completely reliant on selling only to new customers on eBay.
By adding this second string to your marketing bow, you should be able to make additional profits from your eBay investment. |
