Customer Services

When you can afford to spend a lot of money to build your brand, there’s a difference between customer service and branding. When you have little money for advertising, as is true of many eBay retail businesses, for all practical purposes there isn’t much difference between customer service and branding. It’s your superb customer service that will build your brand both on eBay and other places online.

Successful online retailers offer very good customer service. In fact, great customer service, with Amazon.com in the lead, has become the hallmark of online commerce. The word quickly gets around the Internet about retailers who do not treat their customers well. For example, the comparative shopping directories show not only the price of products but consumer ratings on the vendors selling the products. Therefore, I conclude—although branding experts might quibble about this—that for building an eBay retail business, customer service is almost synonymous with branding.

What Is Customer Service?

Customer service is all of the things you do to make a buyer ’s purchase as effortless and convenient as possible. It’s also the things you do to assist a buyer in effortlessly getting off to a good start in using the products you sold.

Here is a short list of some of the basic practices that require your attention in your own retailing organization so you can provide first rate customer service:

• Well-organized business procedures

• Timely communication with customers

• Easy checkout

• Quick fulfillment

The above list shows that if you are well organized to conduct your retail business in a professional and business-like manner, such an approach will go a long ways towards providing excellent customer service. What makes everything work, in addition to the list above, is your own personal attention to detail and your employees’ personal attention to detail. In a word, no system operates without somebody adjusting it and tweaking it everyday to make it work well.

Personal Touch

The other thing that makes a retail sales system work well is your personal attention to problems (and your employees’ personal attention to problems). The problems of which I am speaking are the problems buyers have that only you can solve. For most products, the routine transactions do not have problems. But inevitably buyers have problems with some products. It’s up to you as a seller to make sure that those problems are minimal, are handled expeditiously, and make the experience of resolving such problems seem effortless and convenient for buyers.

Cost-Effectiveness Review

Customer service is expensive and it takes time. It’s one of those rare marketing techniques that is expensive and does take time but is nonetheless very worthwhile. It’s a must-do. Your business will never reach its maximum volume and profitability without good customer service, and your retail business could very well fail, particularly on the Web, if you do not provide good customer service.