In your quest to build credibility as an Ebay seller, few things are more important than creating and following consistent store policies. Doing so will provide your customers with an attractive buying atmosphere, where they will feel safe making any transaction.

Whenever I create store policies--whether it be for an Ebay business or an Internet business--I use one standard: I promise what I can reasonably deliver. And I deliver more than I promise as often as possible.

If I can reasonably offer to ship everything two days after payment, I will promise it. But if I get chance to ship some items within one day, I take that opportunity to overdeliver.

Not only is this a more ethical approach--delivering or overdelivering on all promises--but it is also a more practical business strategy for long-run.

Developing relationships with your customers is best way to get repeat sales, testimonials, and positive feedback--the three pillars which will support your business and increase your cashflow.

You should extend this principle to other policies.

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.