The festive season brings numerous possibilities for sellers worldwide. It has been a trend that has gained popularity and is on the rise with every passing year. This year won’t be any different. This year festive season sales will go wild owing to the alarming rate at which online shoppers have increased in the past few months—the courtesy for which goes to Covid-19. An increase in online shoppers means the festive season will break records. It’ll be more significant, more generous, and extraordinary than all the previous years. But, with great moments of joy, eBay sellers also face issues. There are various eBay problems sellers can relate to. The online selling problems on eBay faced by sellers often become a nightmare during the festive season.
Holiday Sales on eBay
Retail sales through online shopping is now a phenomenon. You can feel its presence all across the world. Preparing well in advance gives you time and energy to plan further and prepare when the festive season starts. Preparing for the entire fourth quarter for sales can be of the essence.
Create a calendar, and begin drafting your strategies and plans for the upcoming festive season. If you face any problem, you can even get ideas online from various blogs and informational guides to help you through the process. Even if you prepare with all the planning and selling strategies, you still can’t be ready for the eBay selling problems.
Common Problems Faced by eBay Sellers
It won’t be anything new if I ask you to prepare for the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Everyone out there will say the same. However, very few of them will talk about the problems selling on eBay brings forth for sellers during holiday sales and how you can avoid it. Trust me. No one wants carefully planned and strategised holiday preparations to blow up in their face. So, let me help you get acquainted with some of the most common problems sellers face when selling on eBay. These issues are the most common problems faced by online sellers. They also account for the majority of fundamental eBay sellers’ problems.
Problems Sellers Face When Starting on eBay
When you’re new to eBay, it’s obvious to get hurdles you might find challenging to get through. Taking proper steps and following these paths mentioned below can help you through them.
#1. Shipping Problems
Relying on eBay shipping facilities is a good option for new eBay sellers as they use postal services. But once you put your entrepreneurial skills to use and grow into one big business, a third party shipping service is required. It’ll not only save you money on the packages. Still, it will also be beneficial as they can provide you with real-time shipping data. Again, with the festive season and the ongoing pandemic at large, a suitable logistics carrier will go through the rough waters to make that delivery. It’ll not fail you.
However, Suppose you’re also selling through your store. In that case, it’s better to start using an integration app to divert the incoming eBay order requests to your store and begin fulfilling orders through the store. As it will not only help you manage inventory but also make shipping easier.
#2. Not Using Proper Product Images
The eBays product images need to be at least 500 pixels to list your products and 800 pixels to use the auto magnifier. People generally overlook this fact and use pictures taken with cellphones and upload them for listing products.
Also, eBay doesn’t like the CMYK colour format for images. As you know, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) happens to be a preferred choice of design for printed media. The digital screens use RGB format for displaying colours on your tablets, mobiles, desktop, and other devices. Try sticking to RGB format for images as CMYK format might go polaroid on you when inserting images for the products. This is one of the most common problems eBay sellers have to face.
#3. eBay Seller Limits
Yeah, you read that right. The issue of seller limits on eBay is a thing. It has been put into the system to keep a check on user experience. It’s not your fault. If you’re new to eBay, it’ll cap your listings, which can be pretty frustrating, especially if you are doing great on other platforms and in your store.
Reducing the number of items available per listing helps. You can also contact eBay and request that they increase the limit if you’ve had an excellent track record.
Problems eBay Sellers Face: Holiday Season
Being a new or an old seller never makes things easy when it’s the festive season. Good and proper planning needs to go into sellers’ marketing and preparations to get the best out of the festive season sales.
#1. Overselling
Managing inventory happens to be the first thing every business owner learns. Every single seller out there wants to sell hard during the holiday season. But taking in orders that you can’t fulfil not only means losing a sale but also a customer—the customer who trusted you with something that you couldn’t deliver.
It’s easy to lose track when you’re selling on multiple fronts at the same time. And it is a tremendous challenge for e-commerce. So, get yourself an integration app to connect your eBay account and your store. It syncs everything in real-time, making it easier for you to manage the inventory from the app.
#2. Return and Refund
Be ready. Getting a large number of sales also means there will be a few, or maybe a little more than a few unsatisfied customers. eBay is a customer-centric platform and makes sure it has satisfied customers. So this leaves you with an eBay seller issue of returns and refunds you would not like to make during the busy festive season.
eBay entertains up to 30 days and more for return. You can use it to your benefit by starting to give the 30 days return. When you do so, eBay will begin showing your products higher in its results. An added benefit is building trust as the buyers will know that the customers can trust you. Above all, getting scammed on offering returns and refunds scares you and stops you from providing returns on eBay. Then, you can include specific terms in your return policy. Disclaimers that state about returns that covers something like “Items with original tags and packaging” can work wonders.
#3. Negative Feedbacks
It’s nothing but human nature to try and avoid lousy performance. We strive to excel, so we buy from eBay sellers who are best in what they do. The customer feedback and ratings are how this judgment gets made.
The feedback score depends on trading. It means you can both sell as well as buy products to get a good feedback score. So, try getting more positive feedback initially through sales and purchases to gain new customers’ trust.
#4. Having a Flagged eBay Account
The flagged account is the most common eBay seller issue amidst the dropshippers. Suppose you are a dropshipper who has experienced a drop in impressions and views. It might be because of your eBay flagged account.
A flagged account on eBay sees a considerable slump in its product impressions, affecting sales. eBay will flag your account if they find any listing manipulation. Misguiding item location or any other similar factor can get taken as unfair means.
Setting the correct product location is essential to get that flag removed. Also, start following the guidelines and policies set by eBay to avoid the flagged seller account problem altogether.
#5. Not Strategizing for Holiday Season
It’s not just a mistake. It is a disaster waiting to happen when the Holidays arrive. Usually, eBay sellers go into the planning phase months before the holiday season begins. It gets done so that they can maximise every aspect of the selling process. Maintaining calendars, marking dates, marketing strategies, and integrating the stores happens to be one of the most important things.
Not strategizing and walking straight into the holidays won’t do you any good as you may fail without proper preparation and planning. And it’ll be due to the cut-throat competition among eBay sellers the holiday season triggers. So, plan yourself or take help from Holiday marketing and strategy guides available online to excel.
#6. Trying to Over-do
Sellers usually try to become the jack of all trades when it comes to making sales. Trying to list everything and target audiences of all types can backfire. Instead, don’t do anything that you wouldn’t normally do. Sticking to your fortè and selling the products targeting your specific demographic is more important.
Moreover, prepare your store for the holiday season such that it does not buckle under the holiday season pressure when the sale starts.
#7. Only Selling on eBay
There can be no better time to expand your business than this upcoming festive season. Exploring new customers by starting sales on new platforms or creating your online store can be precisely what your business needs. It’ll help you increase the customer base and the conversion rate.
The new sales opportunity through multichannel selling can be challenging if not managed as you’ll have to look after shipping, orders, inventory, and products at two different places.
Integrating the eBay seller account into your store can be of great benefit in this. It will ensure you can freely sell in different places and lend you a helping hand with the management process. These integration apps provide complete assistance with all the frameworks like WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.
Conclusion
You start neglecting the contingency plans when you focus too much on the business’s selling aspect during the festive season. These plans help you counter any or all trouble that may or may not arise in the upcoming future.
There are a lot of problems and issues eBay sellers face while selling on eBay. Now that you know, a few from the lot work accordingly to keep them at bay during the rush hour. Always remember, you have to work hard and be farsighted in your overall approach. Doing so will always result in the unprecedented growth of your business.