Many people underestimate the potential of online ecommerce. You can sell anything from books to electronic to gardening equipment on the net. Ebay is the perfect marketplace to make easy money on ebay. With millions of dollars of transactions per day, you can make a full time living just by selling on ebay.

The first step to making money on ebay is to setup a seller account on ebay and if possible setup a storefront on ebay. It??s cheaper in the long run and you can put up more inventory for sale.

Ebay has made it very easy to setup your own store on Ebay. Even if you are not computer savvy, there are step by step guide that can guide you. After that, you need to learn how to advertise to attract targeted potential buyers to your auctions.

The key to learning how to make money on ebay is selecting the right ebay categories, the title and subtitle and the right keywords to attract visitors to your auction listings. There are various ebay tools such as the ebay research tool and other third party ebay research tools such as terapeak and hammertap that can assist you in this aspect.

Ebay also has several upgrade options to make your auction listings stand out but they cost money I would recommend you buy the upgrade to bold your ads at the minimum.

Another important aspect if you want to run a long term ebay business is your reputation. On ebay, it is transparent via the feedback option. Potential buyers can see the feedback from your previous customers and it can help you tremendously if you have a 100% positive ebay feedback.

There are several guides online that can teach you how to make easy money on ebay. Some provide genuine good information while many are just ebay scams and you should be careful who you learn from.

I can answer this question for you right now: the answer is yes. In fact, the answer is YES! the biggest yes youve ever heard. Of course the customer is always right. If you want to be a successful eBay seller, you should go miles out of your way to make sure every single one of your customers is 100% satisfied, however much time or money it might cost you.

A dissatisfied customer will leave negative feedback, and negative feedback is to be avoided at all costs. That one piece of negative feedback will always cost you more than it would have to deal with the complaint, whatever the value of the items you sell. You should consider any positive feedback percentage under 100% to be an absolute disaster, and a personal failure on your part.

But What If

But nothing! There is no situation where you, as a seller, should get into any dispute with a buyer. Here are a few common situations and how to handle them.

They say the item never arrived: Politely ask the buyer to wait a few more days to see if it turns up, and then email you again if it still hasnt arrived. If it still hasnt arrived, you should assume it was lost in the mail somehow and offer to send a replacement if you have one, or give them a full refund otherwise. No, I dont care what that costs you. Are you serious about selling on eBay or not?

The item has been damaged in the mail: You must offer to replace it or take it back for a refund without hesitation.

They say the item doesnt match the description: Resist the urge to email back with yes it does, you just didnt read the description properly. Take the item back for a refund, and edit your description if you need to, to make any confusing points extra clear.

Im sure youre spotting a pattern by now. Offering a refund will make almost any problem go away, and it really will cost you less in the long run. Remember, one piece of negative feedback will stay with you forever, while having a 100% positive rating is like owning a bar of solid gold.

You should always handle customers complaints before they complain to eBay in fact, you should email them pre-emptively to ask if they have any. Going through the dispute process is time consuming, reflects badly on you and is downright unnecessary.

Are you still not convinced? Think this would only work with cheap items? Well, you see, the higher the price of the items you sell, the more your reputation is worth to you. Lets say you were selling $10,000 worth of items each week, for example, and making a $1,000 profit per week overall. You might think that refunding one customers $1,000 purchase would be a tragedy, losing you your whole weeks profit. Its far better to look at it this way: if you dont give that refund, then not only will you lose the next weeks profit, but youll probably lose a few weeks profit after that too. Now which option looks better?

I absolutely cant emphasise enough the importance of really believing that the customer is always right. But trying to make excuses for complaints isnt the only thing you need to avoid. There are a lot of pitfalls that you need to avoid if you dont want to kill your business before its even started properly and Ill show you in my next post what they are.