Tuesday 14 August 2012

How to ensure great feedback for your online store

In today's realm of online selling, the majority of the power lies in the hands of the buyers. With a number of different stores all competing for a customers business with great discounts and offers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make your online store a success.

One of the crucial factors in determining whether your store is a success or failure is customer reviews and feedback. When using online seller platforms such as eBay, the feedback comes in the for of a Detailed Seller Rating (DSR). This rating alone will decide whether a customer purchases from your store or not. To make your eBay store as big a success as you possibly can, you need to ensure that you have an extremely high DSR rating.  

When a customer visits your eBay store, before looking at your products or your delivery charges, the first thing they look at is your feedback and your rating. If you have a low rating, in the eyes of the customer you are unreliable and offer a poor service. This will result in them leaving your store altogether in order to find a store that has a better rating. 

Your DSR rating is determined by four different criteria:

  • Item as described
  • Communication
  • Dispatch time
  • Postage and packaging charges


Item as described


When a customer looks at the images of your products and reads through the description, they get an idea of how the product should be. Once the person has received the product, they then compare their earlier expectations with what they have got, to determine if they are happy with the product. The customer will then leave a positive review if they find that the product they received met with their original expectations.

To give you the best chance of having a high rating for this category, you want to ensure that you everything you write about each of your products is entirely truthful, with no lies or exaggerations whatsoever. If you make a product sound better than it actually is, although this will result in more products being sold in the short term, it will hamper your long term sales as your DSR rating will suffer for it. If you create unrealistic expectations through your descriptions, there is no way the delivered product can live up to how the item was described.

If you are selling any items that are refurbished or second hand, make sure you identify both in the description and through your images, any problems that the item has such as dents, scuffs or other marks. Obviously, advertising a product without stating any marks they have on them is going to come as a surprise to the customer when they receive the product, most likely resulting in an extremely low feedback rating.

Communication


The more you communicate with your customers through the purchasing process, the happier and more satisfied they are going to be. This doesn't mean contact them everyday asking them how they are, but it does mean keeping them up to date with the entire process. This can be done simply by setting up automated notifications for the various stages in the process. This will mean that the customer will receive an email to confirm the order has been placed, when the order has been processed and when the product has been shipped. This also means your customer is fully aware of any issues that may have occurred along the way. Having delays in the order or shipping process are the kinds of things which lower your communication rating if you don't keep your customers in the loop.

Dispatch time


Customers today want everything instantly. When setting up your checkout process, you want to get from the order being placed, to the item being dispatched by the courier as fast as you can. Once the item has been dispatched to the courier any delays are no longer your fault, but a delay in getting to that stage is. Constant reviews of your checkout process will allow you to identify any aspects that are slowing down the overall process. Tweaking this process with improvements is what's going to help you achieve a faster dispatch time, preventing your customer from becoming annoyed by a lengthy process.

Postage and packaging charges


While most customer aren't going to expect you to have no delivery or postage charges when shipping items across large distances, how you stand in comparison with your rivals is what's going to give you that high feedback. What you should look to do is slightly undercut your rival competitors. What this means is visiting the various stores of your competitors to see how much they charge for postage and packing for the items they sell. You then want to have your postage and packing costs at a price that is lower than your rivals, making your's seem much better in comparison.

Although, all these tasks may sound straightforward when running an online business, it is not just doing them well, but doing them to an impeccable standard that is going to result in you gaining as high a feedback rating as you possibly can.

eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk

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