Common Sense eCommerce

This past week, a buyer won two listings. The listings were for the same item in different color patterns. It’s unusual for one person to buy two of these things so I was not the least bit surprised when buyer wrote in:

I only want the pink one, not the black & white one, can you cancel the black and white one?

I wrote back that we could cancel it, but that we would have to charge her the final value fee plus the listing fee, explaining that it was our cost of the transaction. It only amounted to only an extra $3 which she paid. I would not have not pushed the point over that amount, however I always attempt to recoup the costs on things like this.

In this post, I talked about the mindset of non paying eBay buyers as maybe actually being ‘retail buyers’. I think this example illustrates this mindset perfectly. This buyer simply picked up 2 different variants of the same item and then decided on one. Not unlike what a buyer would do in a typical retail store or online store.

This buyer was not an eBay newbie. She had several hundred feedback points and had been on eBay for a few years. This makes me think that eBay could do a lot more to give the buyers a ‘retail system’ if that’s what they want. I know eBay stores are supposed to do that, but eBay is doing a very poor job of promoting those stores. After all, remember that they had to ‘reset the balance of the marketplace’ last year to steer sellers back to core listings. Meanwhile eBay store owners are pretty much left to fend for themselves in getting shoppers to their stores.

All my listings have incentives for the shopper to go to the store, but eBay itself needs to do more to raise awareness of the store paradigm. If shoppers desire a ‘retail experience’ versus an ‘auction experience’, then shouldn’t eBay should do more to provide that?

Tags: eBay Retail, eBay Stores, eBay Shopping, eBay Selling

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