How to Increase Your eBay Backend Sales.

It shouldn’t too hard to increase your eBay backend sales – because the chances are you currently aren’t making any! Backend sales are sales to customers who have already bought an item, also known as ‘up-selling’. These are usually easier sales to make than normal sales: in sales-speak, your existing customers are ‘warm leads’.

It’s a technique you’ve probably noticed being used on you in shops: you buy something, and you’re offered a $5 piece of equipment to keep it clean, or make it easier to use. The usual human response is to say to yourself “heck, what’s another five dollars – it might be useful”. It’s just another five dollars to them, but they might have just added 20% to your profit margin.

Figure Out What Goes Together.

Out of the things you stock, which cheaper things are there that could be useful to someone who now owns one of the more expensive ones? For example, if you sell digital cameras, the backend product is digital camera memory – they never come with enough out of the box. The backend products for a printer would be ink and paper. Try to think laterally!

If you can’t think of anything, take a look around at the cheaper ‘extra’ items that your competitors offer, and see if you can find a supplier for them. There are very few product areas where this technique doesn’t apply.

Include Letters in Packages.

When you send items out in the post, include a brief sales letter with products you think might be of interest to the customer. It’s like sending out a personalised, targeted catalogue to your customers with every purchase. Again, you’ll find that a significant percentage of people won’t have bothered to look at what else you were selling, and will go back to buy a few more things.

To stop people from just putting such a letter aside and thinking they won’t do anything about it right now, you might like to include some kind of limited time offer – 10% off if you order within the next month, for example.

Email Your Customers.

Each time you sell something to a customer, you get valuable market information about them, and they get to see that they can trust you as a seller. That’s why backend sales are so powerful. Keep your customers updated in your newsletter, making sure you list any new products there that you might have in stock. The chances are that these customers will be far more eager to buy from you.

Consumable Products.

If the product that the customer bought from you to begin with is consumable (it will run out), then this is a special case. You shouldn’t try to make the backend sale straight away, but should instead wait long enough that the average customer would have just run out of the product. That’s the time to strike.

If you want to keep your buyers, then you need to provide good customer service. 

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