eBay Mystery Auctions: A Great Business IF You Proceed With Caution
By Avril Harper
There’s a dark side to mystery auctions, one you must take on board before entering this business. The truth is the mystery auction business is packed with scamsters, people offering illegal items on eBay in the guise of listings with clues and codes that even a child can crack.
Scamsters and rogue sellers and bidders abound in the mystery auction business, and they will make your life hell, but that should not deter you from pursuing the often magnificent profits available for genuine sellers.
The bottom line is mystery auctions gain little respect on eBay and most sellers are tarred with the same brush, as scamsters, rogues, vagabonds, cheats.
It isn’t true of course, and many very reputable sellers make their living at mystery auctions, including big name companies like Stanley Gibbons, stamp dealers, and there are some sellers specialising in high value items at mystery auction.
The reason I tell you this? Simply that few people trust new mystery auctioneers, you need a track record before people will trust you not to send a copy of Yellow Pages in a box just big enough for the laptop computer someone thinks they just bought, or the mystery box you were told is filled with $$$ notes is actually a pack of Monopoly Money.
You need to establish credibility, build feedback, word hard at the beginning and throughout your career as a mystery auctioneer to encourage lots of repeat buyers and word of mouth recommendations from satisfied customers. Once that happens you’re laughing because this really can be a very real road to riches on eBay.
Mystery Auctions: Building Credibility, Overcoming Common Problems
Rogue eBayers, buyers and sellers, create the majority of problems facing genuine mystery auction sellers. But their effects are generally short-lived on eBay. eBay’s listing policies are rigidly enforced in all selling categories, including Mystery Auctions, and frequent offenders are quickly found and punished, with their listings withdrawn and they are usually expelled from eBay.
There one problem no mystery auction seller can avoid, which derives from bidders’ and buyers’ perceptions of what a specific mystery package contains. People often see what they want to see, and will convince themselves they know what the package contains. When the package arrives, they find they are wrong, disappointment sets in – known in the trade as ‘buyer remorse’ – and culminates in complaints, negative feedback, abusing communications between buyer and seller, and chargebacks through PayPal or other payment processor.
That’s the bad news out of the way. The good news is there’s much you can do to gain and increase credibility in your mystery auctions, very quickly indeed, and to develop a reputation for selling value-for-money packages containing quality items that always generate good customer feedback.
Your first mystery auction is the most important of all, it sets the pace for good feedback and paves the way to repeat custom and regular buyers.
That’s because your customers with a happy first mystery auction experience will be delighted with what they’ve bought and keen to buy again from you.
It’s very hard to enter the mystery auction business without quality feedback and recognition for good customer service. So it makes sense to build a mystery auction business on top of an existing eBay business, one with a minimum 100 positive feedback count and listings that look good and are obviously well planned and professionally executed. In short, your illustrations must be clear and show the product from several different angles, your description must be free of spelling and grammatical mistakes, you must ensure all questions asked are answered with courtesy and respect for the bidder.
This is how to grow that business on top of an existing business and with additional credibility-building features included:
* Start an eBay business selling low price, high demand items, such as eBooks or small collectibles. Gain seller feedback fast.
* Buy lots of low value items from other sellers and request early positive feedback.
* Donate a portion of your earnings to charity. Scamsters do not do this, no matter what the benefits to their perceived integrity.
* Write a guide or review, write several guides and reviews, they’ll feature on all your listings and establish you as a caring, considerate individual, intelligent and wanting to give (advice) as well as receive (money!) It makes sense to write guides about mystery auctions or about the type of products featured in your auctions. So if you are selling mystery packages for scrapbooking enthusiasts, write a guide about creating scrapbooks. If you sell collectors’ dolls – in or outside of mystery auctions – write about current auction values; if pets are your subject write about health issues for household pets. It all makes you look like an expert and thoroughly all-round-good-guy or gal.
* GREAT IDEA. Write articles similar to subjects used in your eBay guides and add these to article directories to create even more respect for your business and to create incoming links to your eBay listings. Generally accepted as the world’s top article directory is www.ezinearticles.com
* Respond to bidder and buyer communications and complaints immediately they arise. Complaints and problems fester the longer they go unresolved and negative feedback grows more likely. Most sellers specify that refunds are not allowed for mystery auction packages. I suggest you do consider giving refunds especially for low value items that can be easily recycled or form Second Chance offers to non-winning bidders. Very high value items are a different matter, especially if the disgruntled winner leaves feedback – good, bad or indifferent – that reveals the content of your package in which case the mystery is gone and relisting is not an option.
* Accept PayPal only. It adds credibility and gets people to pay faster and deters inveterate non-paying bidders who get caught up in the frenzy and bid high, then suffer a heavy bout of buyer remorse before even getting their hands on your package or knowing what it contains. PayPal also deters people bidding purely for bonus items offered to all bidders who will quickly find their PayPal accounts closed for abusing the system.
Avril Harper is an eBay PowerSeller and provides hundreds of business opportunity articles http://www.avrilharper.com. She has produced a free guide - 103 POWERSELLER TIPS - which you can download with other freely distributable reports and eBooks at http://www.toppco.com
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