Good customer service on eBay starts the moment a buyer searches for your products. Every subsequent touchpoint with that buyer represents an opportunity to win their business or lose out to a competitor. 

The good news is, optimised customer service doesn’t have to mean spending more time in conversation with your customers. It simply means ensuring your listings are fully optimised for the conversion from that very first click.

Why is Customer Services so Important in 2022?

A recent survey conducted by the delivery experience platform Sorted has suggested that shoppers are spending less money online and asking for better service.

The survey, which polled 2,000 shoppers in the UK and US, found that 82% of respondents stated that concerns about inflation had resulted in them being more careful with money. As a result, 63% said they were spending less money than a year ago.

Concerns about Brexit and the rising cost of goods (56%), the availability of discounts (24%), and lack of consumer confidence (16%), were cited as the primary reasons for online shoppers reducing their online spending.

Covid-19 is No Longer an Excuse for Bad Service

While consumer spending has been cut, those same buyers demand a better online shopping experience.

Two-thirds of surveyed consumers said that they felt levels of customer service had declined since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, despite the impact of the pandemic, 43% stated that Covid-19 was no longer a good enough excuse for poor service.

In terms of good service, low shipping costs and on-time delivery were prioritised by consumers when considering future purchases.

Good Customer Service Starts With Your eBay Listings

With the threat of reduced customer spending and increased due diligence before purchase, sellers have to work harder to ensure that their sales don’t fall off a cliff.

That hard work begins by ensuring that sellers’ eBay listings are fully optimised.

An optimised eBay listing will:

• Ensure products are discoverable in eBay search: We’ve written numerous posts about how listing best practices can impact eBay SEO. eBay Search best practices require careful use of product titles, descriptions, images, video, item specifics, expedited shipping, etc. Sellers may also wish to consider using promoted listings to improve their visibility.
• Build consumer confidence and trust: When consumers are being more cautious about their purchases, sellers will want to emphasise their trustworthiness. This process begins by answering buyer questions about the product, shipping details, and returns policies within the listing. Remember, the more information you include in a listing, the fewer customer service questions you’ll have to answer pre and post-purchase. A detailed listing may also reduce the number of customer returns sellers have to deal with. eBay customers are notoriously demanding. Therefore, any investment in additional content in your listings will be rewarded with less time spent on dealing with customer service issues.
• Generate brand awareness: A well-designed template will ensure everything in your listing is in the correct place and can quickly be found by your customers. This will help build on that all-important consumer confidence and trust and make quicker buying decisions. An on-brand listing is also essential for any seller with aspirations to generate repeat sales, cross-promote products, and sell across multiple channels, including their own eCommerce store.
• Highlight free, expedited, and flexible shipping options: Offering multiple shipping options not only gives your customers a greater choice about when and how they receive their packages. Offering free and quick delivery options can also improve a seller’s ranking in eBay search.

Why Aren’t Sellers Optimising Their Listings?

While every eBay seller should be aware of eBay’s regular advice about listing best-practice – how many of them actually apply the recommendations to their listings in a timely fashion?

We get it. Optimising your listings is a difficult job. This is especially true when a seller has thousands of historic listings. However, the failure to optimise your listings on a regular basis can have a catastrophic impact on your eBay business.

The problem of poorly optimised listings is amplified the longer listings are left to run. Slow selling items caused by poorly optimised listings may ultimately impact a seller’s eBay search relevance across their entire catalogue of products.

Where to Start with Your eBay Optimisation Strategy

Part of the problem is knowing where to start with your optimisation strategy.

A great starting point is to get a free eBay listing optimisation report.

The optimisation report will give you a clear insight into the health of your listings, taking into account multiple criteria, including your titles, descriptions, categories, item specifics, images, video, shipping, pricing, and promotions.

This information might highlight the need for some simple updates that can be implemented in no time at all. Or it could showcase the need to make more dramatic updates to your listing strategy. Either way, it’s better to know what is holding your eBay sales back and have the knowledge to fix them rather than just sitting back and complaining that eBay isn’t as good as it used to be.

Do you want to improve your customers’ experience from the moment they conduct a search for your products? Click here to book a free 15-minute consultation call with one of our eBay optimisation experts.