Sellers have also said that when they get a buyer email, they answer it quickly and keep a database of buyer contact history. There’s nothing more frustrating for the Seller and the Buyer than a he-said, she-said situation. Some Sellers even maintain a database of Buyers email. This database allows them to check back to what they said last week, last month or last year and avoids confusion.

In talking with Sellers, they’ve told us that having pro-active customer support has not only increased their number of listings, and increased sales and revenue, it’s also increased the number of positive feedbacks, which has increased their Feedback Score!

And of course, the happier your Buyers are, the higher your Feedback Score will be, and the more listings, sales and revenue you will get! And if you follow these tips, you won’t get buried under a bazillion emails!

HostedSupport offers ezSupport for eBay, which can help you get a handle on buyer email and make it convenient for your Buyers to get answers. eBay Sellers using ezSupport for eBay report the following benefits:

- Automatically answering 80% of customer email
- Automatically retaining all buyer emails and storing them indefinitely
- Freeing up time that can be used to increase revenues
- A 25% increase in listings and revenues due to the email time savings

More than 1,000 eBay Sellers use the product, including Top Sellers like Eforcity. If you would like to see detailed case studies on how eBay Sellers are using ezSupport for eBay, you can go to www.HostedSupport.com and visit the Case Study section of the website.

Anyone have any questions?

Many eBay sellers ask us about the setup process for ezSupport for eBay. It's really very simple, and is done online using a setup "wizard" that takes you through the process step by step. You simply enter your most frequently asked questions/answers to build your knowledgebase. Then as you use ezSupport to manually respond to questions you can automatically add more questions to your knowledgebase as they come in. This allows your knowledgebase to become "smarter" over time so that a larger percentage of questions are automatically handled.

We're also asked about how ezSupport's FAQ system compares to eBay's standard FAQs that can be added to the "Ask seller a question" form. Probably the biggest advantage of ezSupport for eBay is that you're allowed an unlimited number of FAQs. Some of our sellers have hundreds of question/answer pairs so that a very high percentage of their buyer question don't require the seller to manually reply. Another big advantage for ezSupport is that our FAQs are searchable. Buyers can simply type in a question and ezSupport will return matching answers. Also if a question does come in through the "Ask seller a question" form, ezSupport can analyze the text and send a matching answer if one is available.

And here's a link to a case study of an actual eBay seller: http://www.hostedsupport.com/index.cfm?fuse=partners.cases&csdx=5

Thanks everyone for reading through the workshop material. This concludes the "Avoid Holiday Headaches with Customer Support Tools" workshop. Be sure to check the Workshop Calendar for upcoming workshops. We hope to see you at a workshop soon!!!! Deirdre eBay Community Development