Your customers have already a) purchased from you and b) agreed to receive special offers. From here, it shouldn’t be too hard to get follow-up sales. They are already hooked--just give them a good offer.

For instance, you could send out special offers for complementary products at certain intervals. You could target people who purchased digital cameras and offer them sticks of memory at a discounted price, but only if they buy within a certain amount of days after close of auction. You could do same thing with camera bags--and also set a specific date.

If you sell jewelry, you could offer customers a matching set of earrings for a necklace at a discount. Or cleaning tools. Or a jewelry box.

There are a number of different ways in which you can structure your Ebay post-sales follow-up with your autoresponder. There are only two real rules you should follow:

1) Do not, under any circumstances, add people to your list who did not specifically ask to be added to it. It is illegal and unethical, and it could land you in jail; and

2) Make sure you are targeting right people with right follow-up pitch. If you’re trying to sell discount plastic dinosaurs to someone who just bought a case of motor oil, you probably wont get response you want.

. . .other than that, it is completely up to you. Come up with some creative ideas; put them to work; and you can easily double or triple lifetime worth of each customer who shops at your Ebay store.

In addition, knowing that she will lose nothing anyway, she will realize that she can get item up to ten days sooner if she uses BIN option to order it then, rather than waiting for auction clock to tick down.

The strategy I described above is very safe. I use it for majority of my auctions and I always get positive results. At worst, it will take me 3-4 weeks to sell an item, but I wont ever lose money. I just adjust price to compensate for additional fees.

Strategy #3

Another effective way to use a ten-day setting is in conjunction with dutch auctions--or auctions that sell a number of same item. Ten-day auctions will give you longest amount of time to move highest amount of products.

You may also want to feature ten-day dutch auctions, depending on what items you are selling. If you’re selling information products and rely on quantity of sales for profit, this wont be effective; but if you’re selling a number of expensive, high profit-margin items, featuring your auction is probably a good idea.

________________

If none of these strategies works for you, you should consider following two things: 1) price other Ebay businesses sell your product for. If someone else IS selling your product, there is a reason for it - and it’s probably price. If you cannot afford to sell at a reasonable price, you need to find a new source to buy from. And if your product’s price is reasonable, then 2) you need to redesign your auction and find new ways of pulling in targeted traffic.