Evade the eBay Scams!

If you're doing business on eBay, you must know how to identify a scam, and how to evade them. If you are scammed, there are a number of actions you can take to correct the situation.

You can without doubt avoid many scams with the payment method that you use, whether you are a buyer or a seller. eBay owns Paypal, and in most cases, Paypal is the payment method you should use.






As a buyer, if you are scammed or less than satisfied with the item when it arrives, you can dispute the charge easily, and demand a refund. The seller must reply and show proof that the item was shipped, or Paypal will return your funds to your account.

As a seller, you can shield yourself by only accepting Paypal. This will remove the chances of receiving a bad check or having the buyer dispute a credit card charge. Instead, they must dispute the charge through PayPal, and you of course will be able to provide evidence that you shipped the product.

Another frequent scam that buyers use is the bidding scam. This type of scam is run either with two separate eBay accounts - with one person in control of both of them, or with two friends with separate eBay accounts. A very small bid is placed on your item, using one account. This is followed by a very high bid, from the other eBay account. Before the bidding ends, the high bid is cancelled or withdrawn, leaving the low bid as the winning bid.

If you are an eBay seller, you can further protect your auctions by placing a notice on your auctions page declaring that you have the right to back out of the sale if you suspect potential fraud.

Is The Ebay Customer Always Right?

I can answer this question for you right now: the answer is 'yes'. In fact, the answer is 'YES!' – the biggest yes you've ever heard. Of the course the customer is always right. If you want to be a successful eBay seller, you should go miles out of your way to make sure every single one of your customers is 100% satisfied, however much time or money it might cost you.

A dissatisfied customer will leave negative feedback, and negative feedback is to be avoided at all costs. That one piece of negative feedback will always cost you more than it would have to deal with the complaint, whatever the value of the items you sell. You should consider any positive feedback percentage under 100% to be an absolute disaster, and a personal failure on your part.






But What If…

But nothing! There is no situation where you, as a seller, should get into any dispute with a buyer. Here are a few common situations and how to handle them.

They say the item never arrived: Politely ask the buyer to wait a few more days to see if it turns up, and then email you again if it still hasn't arrived. If it still hasn't arrived, you should assume it was lost in the post somehow and offer to send a replacement if you have one, or give them a full refund otherwise. No, I don't care what that costs you. Are you serious about selling on eBay or not?

The item has been damaged in the post: You must offer to replace it or take it back for a refund without hesitation.

They say the item doesn't match the description: Resist the urge to email back with "yes it does, you just didn't read the description properly". Take the item back for a refund, and edit your description if you need to, to make any confusing points extra clear.

I'm sure you're spotting a pattern by now. Offering a refund will make almost any problem go away, and it really will cost you less in the long run. Remember, one piece of negative feedback will stay with you forever, while having a 100% positive rating is like owning a bar of solid gold.

You should always handle customers' complaints before they complain to eBay – in fact, you should email them pre-emptively to ask if they have any. Going through the dispute process is time consuming, reflects badly on you and is downright unnecessary.

Are you still not convinced? Think this would only work with cheap items? Well, you see, the higher the price of the items you sell, the more your reputation is worth to you. Let's say you were selling $10,000 worth of items each week, for example, and making a $1,000 profit per week overall. You might think that refunding one customer's $1,000 purchase would be a tragedy, losing you your whole week's profit. It's far better to look at it this way: if you don't give that refund, then not only will you lose the next week's profit, but you'll probably lose a few weeks' profit after that too. Now which option looks better?

I absolutely can't emphasise enough the importance of really believing that the customer is always right. But trying to make excuses for complaints isn't the only thing you need to avoid. There are a lot of pitfalls that you need to avoid if you don't want to kill your business before it's even started properly – and I'll show you in the next email what they are.

Make Money Online With Affiliate Programs

Broadly speaking, affiliate program seems including everything, no matter as hot as pay per click advertising or as old as pay per impression or pay per sale or lead marketing. So, it is true that all businesses, no matter big or small, are making money online with affiliate programs. The doubt is only how to select suitable affiliate programs to make money.

What is a partner? What is an affiliate? A partner is an associate who works with others toward a common goal. An affiliate is a subsidiary or subordinate organization that is affiliated with another organization. It seems the difference is there but the basic meaning is the same ?for sharing benefit.

For home base business, affiliate programs have huge advantages: 1. no hustle and be your own boss; 2. with low or even no cost to set up; 3. no hard task to deal with, such as customer service, shipping or inventory management; 4. high income potential and keep running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no holiday no stop and sales everywhere.






Based on individual company's policy, there are some rules that do not allow you to sign up all affiliate programs, such as PPC search engines or gambling affiliate programs may be not compatible. Meanwhile, you may know that every company has its minimum payout and commission rate is different.

In my personal experience, I strongly recommend you sign up third party for your affiliate programs. This will bring you two major advantages: one is save your time; the other is collecting your money together.

There is thousands of individual affiliate programs offered on the internet, many being through third party affiliate program networks such as Clickbank, Commission Junction Linkshare and so on. These companies connect a large number of advertisers and publishers together via their own network.




As a publisher, one registration gives you access to tens, even hundreds of advertisers simultaneously. Tracking partner performance is easy: there is only one technical support contact and easier to manage, like only using one user id and one password. The payment is received as your monthly revenue. Another is third party check affiliate programs' credit and reputation.

Payment thresholds can often be fairly high ?a $50 US minimum is common for international publishers. Finally, a payment delay of two months or more from the date of a sale/lead generation can occur often. Not mention some affiliate programs have been known for not fairly treat affiliate to track sales and leads properly as honestly as they could be. Not mention some affiliate programs announce they are not responsible for missing check. Can we ask whether they really send check?

For those big affiliate programs, like Google AdSense, Amazon, you may participate directly with their affiliate programs.

How should you choose an individual affiliate program? My suggestion is not to choose a affiliate program only according to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of people who are likely to visit your website, it means relevance. For example, if you are targeting home based business on your site, links to affiliate programs with school recruiting program, text-books sale and the like may generate less revenue than banners that link to paid survey companies. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience.

Another suggestion is not necessary to join every single affiliate program that comes your way. Some gurus suggest that sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are only sign up a small amount of affiliate programs.