You just wanted to make a few bucks selling used books online. It all seemed so simple and straightforward until you ran into the one thing you didn’t count on: dealing with customers. Now that we’ve talked about difficult customers and scammers, you may be feeling pretty vulnerable. Can a disgruntled customer damage your business by bringing down your seller rating? Can a spurned scammer exact his revenge by destroying your ability to create repeat business?
Calm down, take a deep breath and repeat after me:
“When it comes to selling on Amazon, there is no such thing as repeat business.”
That’s right. Oh sure, it happens occasionally, you’ll get an order from a customer you’ve sold to before. It’s usually by accident as much as anything else. But in practice, repeat business just doesn’t happen. Customers just have too much choice, they have too many options. Think about how the customer finds used books on Amazon. They search for the book they’re looking for and see who’s selling it. They don’t try and look up sellers they’ve used before, attempting to see if that seller happens to be selling anything they might want to buy. I’ve said it before, Amazon goes out of it’s way to try and make you as the seller invisible to the customer, and that’s just fine. Just be realistic. If you want to build repeat business, get your own website. If you’re trying to build a loyal customer base on Amazon, you’re wasting your time and effort.
So what does set you apart as a seller? It’s gotta be your seller rating right?
Wrong.
Hold on, let me back up for a second. The importance of your rating/feedback does vary from marketplace to marketplace, but let’s start by taking a look at Amazon.
There’s a percentage of customers who will look at your feedback and rating. However, in my experience they tend to be fairly lenient. On Amazon, a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars is considered good. It sure sounds good, right? But let’s think about that. 4.5 out of 5 means that a full 10% of your feedback was neutral or negative. 10%! In my opinion that makes you a pretty poor seller. Unless you are seriously messing up, you should have no problem maintaining a “good” Amazon seller rating.
Then there’s a whole other segment of Amazon buyers who don’t care about your rating at all. These are the customers who are just looking for the lowest priced seller and don’t look at anything else. These are the same buyers who purchase books that are clearly listed as “acceptable”, thinking that they are going to get new books. Whether it’s by virtue of ignorance or apathy, they just don’t pay attention to anything but price.
Ebay is another animal altogether. Ebay evolved in a completely different way. Because Ebay’s transactions weren’t and aren’t backed up by a big company the way Amazon’s are. That’s why Ebay developed much more of a community component; it was necessarily built on trust from it’s inception. As a result, its rating system is better at assessing sellers performance. There is also more of a tendency to look at feedback than there is on Amazon. On the other hand, it’s a much worse place to try and sell books these days.
Half.com is more like Amazon. Again you’ll find that buyers here are usually just looking for the lowest price.
Other marketplaces like Alibris and AbeBooks rate you as a seller based solely on your fulfillment percentage. However as you move into dealing in high volume, a lower fulfillment is just part of doing business.
Feedback and ratings are something to be aware of, but don’t lie awake at night worrying about it. If you’re generally doing the right thing, you’ll be just fine.