Auction Business Frank Ross on 17 Oct 2006 06:59 pm
Dumb eBay Questions
Selling on eBay, I sometimes get frustrated with the repetitive ‘dumb’ questions I seem to get from users. Whenever I start to feel this way, I remember the saying: There’s no such thing as a dumb question.
For example, one question I was getting over and over was “How much is shipping to Canada?”. My response was always the same: “Which province are you in?” I mean, Canada is a huge country and with me in Seattle, it’s a lot different cost-wise to ship to British Columbia than to say, New Brunswick.
That repetitive question prompted me to do 2 things. 1st, I enabled Canadian shipping calculations in the listings and made sure to add enough handling to make up for the time it takes to fill out the customs form, etc. 2nd, I put instructions for Canadian users in the listings (prior to that, there was something vague like ‘contact us for a shipping quote’).
If you get what seem like dumb questions on eBay, maybe it’s because you could be doing something better in your listings. I always ask ‘what could I have done to avoid that question?’ when I get one. Sometimes, they really are dumb questions, but most of the time I find that there is some way I can provide the information to the users so they don’t have to ask.
– Frank Ross