Increasing eBay Seller Score

ebay consulting

eBay TRSA lot of clients ask me to teach them tricks for increasing eBay Seller Score. The problem with this question is that there are a ton of answers to this question and some of those answers work together better than others. for example, if you want to increase sales become a Top Rated Seller (TRS) on eBay. To become a TRS there are a few things you have to do. One trick I recommend to most of my clients is to sell a loss leader product online. Traditionally, retail stores sell loss leader products such as eggs or milk where the retail seller is either taking a small loss or breaking even. The reason they sell this item at such a low price is to get customers to come into the store. Once they are at the store they are more than likely going to buy other items where the retailer will make their desired profit margins. Selling online is a little different because most buyers only purchase 1 item at a time. However, you can strategically setup specific products that will act as a loss leader and even if that item is the only item they buy, you still benefit from the transaction. If you are a serious seller on eBay then you know the importance of being a TRS because of the 20% increase in exposure and the potential 20% savings and increase in sales. However, to become and keep a TRS rating you need to maintain a certain standard in positive Detail Seller Rating (DSR). If you get a negative DSR score it will count against you and potentially cause you to lose TRS status. Now each seller will get a specific number of feedback revision requests that they are able to use each month. How many they get is determined by how many total feedback earned from the previous year. This means, the more items you sell, the more feedback you get. The more feedback you have, the more feedback requests you get, not to mention the higher your overall total feedback count will be which means one negative feedback will count less against you in comparison to having less feedback.

Due to this logic, I recommend to any of my clients that seriously sell on eBay to sell a loss leader product that is low cost, small and light in weight. For example, if you sell cell phones then a great loss leader product would be a car charger or a cell phone case. Both of these items should also be sold as an add-on (up-sell) item but they should also be sold individually and at a low price. By selling these low cost, light weight items you can easily double or triple your monthly sales volume even though it may not impact your bottom line much. The benefit is having double the transactions will allow for double the feedback revisions and each negative will impact you half as much as it would have without these additional transactions.

Pro Tip for Increasing eBay Seller Score

The icing on the cake for selling these loss leader items online is using them to drive traffic to the products that you really want customers to buy. So for example, if you are selling an iPhone case then on that listing within the description you will want to use banner ads to drive customers to your actual iPhone listings.  If you are using a listing tool like ChannelAdvisor this can be done easily by setting up different Ad Templates for each of your major categories.  On your actual cell phone listings descriptions you will want to give information just about the iPhone to get customers to buy it.  On the smaller up-sell items you will use them to drive traffic to your key featured items.  This way if the up-sell item sells on its own then great, it gives you another transaction.  If it causes you to sell another featured item then great, it acted as a lead generation source.  If the customer buyers both, then great, you just hit the jackpot and got two items to sell together.  Whenever you sell more than one item in the same sale you will always make more money due to your savings in combined shipping.  Almost every product category has items that can work as an up-sell/loss leader product.  Just make sure the item is small, light weight and low cost.

Warning: In order for this strategy to work, your operations process must be seamless because having late shipments or inaccurate shipments will hurt you far worse than the gains that come from this tactic. 

Derrick Chan