Common Sense eCommerce

If you have an eBay business, do you treat your customers as ‘one shot deals’ or would you like to have your customers do future business with you? The second option is generally preferable for long term business and customer relationship building. You can use PayPal and Microsoft Access to quickly build a customer list from the eBay PayPal records. This is a mini tutorial and it assumes some basic knowledge of working with files and working with MS Access.

1) Log into your PayPal Account

2) Go to History, then Download My History

3) Using ‘Custom Date Range’ you can type in any date range. Under ‘File types for Download’ select ‘Tab Delimited - Completed Payments’

4) Click ‘Download History’ button. This will prompt you to save the file to your hard drive.

5) Close PayPal and open Microsoft Access

6) Select ‘Tables’, then ‘New’, then ‘Import Table’

7) Select your file (you will have to change your file type to ‘text’). This will launch the Access Import Text Wizard.

8) In the Import Text Wizard, you will encounter this screen that asks you about your delimiters. Check the box “First Row Contains Field Names” and under ‘Text Qualifier’ select the quotation mark (”).

9) The rest of the wizard is self explanatory. One option worth mentioning is the table creation option. You will have an option to create a new table or add into an existing table. If this is your first time, you would create a new table otherwise, you can choose the “in an existing table” option. (That would append the records to the existing table).

What’s in this table? Everything having to do with each PayPal transaction so it should be treated as confidential data! It will have the payment details, the item details and more importantly, the customers shipping address and email address.

What can you do with the table? The addresses are great for sending your customers followup ‘thank you notes’ or ‘thank you postcards’ in the mail. Using Access, you can sort the file by just about any field and using advanced queries, pick out only customers that, for example, spent a certain amount or live in a certain state. Access also makes it easy to print out mailing labels. Even if you’re not sure how you’ll use it, this will help you quickly build your customer list from your eBay sales.

One final note: If the customers didn’t pay via Paypal, they obviously won’t be included. For us, those customers are relatively few (for example, the ones who pay by money order) so we just add them in manually when we have time.

Tags: eBay Customer List, Paypal Records to MS Access, Exporting PayPal Records, eBay Followup Marketing

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