Many people who sell on Ebay completely neglect follow-up process. They post an auction. Someone wins. They send an automated message to winner. They ship item. End of story. End of buyer-seller relationship.

. . .end of customer’s total worth to business --and this is why so many people who sell on Ebay fail or make negligible profits: they have no idea that real money is actually in back-end and follow-up sales.

In this article, I am going to go over one of tools you can use to make follow-up sales on Ebay: autoresponders.

Autoresponders will allow you to automate follow-up and upselling process. You can subscribe to an autoresponding service through a number of different companies. Most will give you a free trial that limits your abilities, but lasts indefinitely.

Getresponse (getresponse.com) is one of these companies. It has a user-friendly control panel, excellent customer service, and offers a free trial version that will give you access to everything you need for early upselling and follow-up.

You can use your autoresponder a number of different ways to make follow-up sales, but you must start by collecting names to load into your autoresponder.

You can do this by asking customers (after you’ve made a sale) if they would like to join your mailing list and receive special offers, discounts, and chance to buy items before they go on auction. Load names and email addresses of people who respond positively into your autoresponder.

Getresponse will send them a confirmation message. The rest is up to you.

Many new Ebay sellers make one of two mistakes: either they overprice items to an unsellable extreme; or they lose money on every transaction by setting low starting prices with no restrictions.

In this lesson, I am going to go over which pricing strategies to use and when if you are using a ten-day auction setup.

Strategy #1

If you are listing a popular item that you are confident will sell for a high price, one strategy you can use is ten-day, one cent starting price, no reserve auction. This is best way to start a bidding war: pull in bidders early with a low starting price and no reserve and give them ten days and two weekends to battle it out.

Depending on profit-margin of item and quality and number of your competitors, you may want to consider using listing upgrades, such as bold, highlight, and feature listing options to ensure your auction sticks out of crowd.

Please note that I do not recommend this strategy for beginners. This is extremely high risk if you do not know how to take risk out of it - and this is not something I can teach you. You must determine this by assessing your own personal inventory with tests.

Strategy #2

Now, if you are new to Ebay or want to list an item with undetermined popularity, you can use a safer, but potentially as profitable bidding strategy for ten-day auctions.

You still wont use a reserve with this strategy. But instead of setting start price low to encourage a bidding war, you are going to set your start price to your ideal selling price - and then couple it with a buy it now price that is slightly higher.