Selling digital goods on eBay, can be a highly profitable route to follow. With little inventory costs & no trips to the post office a lot of traditional hassles are eliminated from an eBay transaction. However, delivery problems can still apply - even with digital goods.
As a seller of ebooks, and special reports on eBay. I often get emails from bidders such as the following:
"Please can you send me the ebook I have purchased asap as have not received yet! many thanks
Katie"
The problem is spam. Almost every email provider now offers a spam filter which can provide a false positive and identify your product as spam. If it ends up in a spam filter, your customer is unlikely to find the email & will end up assuming the product has never been sent. If you received unjustified negative feedback due to your customer being unable to find the email you'd be pretty angry to say the least.
So, how can you ensure your customer receives the product. Firstly, word your email very carefully - trying to avoid words which will be picked up by spam filter. Words such as FREE or OFFER are likely to trigger spam filters. You can currently check your emails at: http://emailcheck.activecampaign.com/
Also, you need to ensure your own domain has not been blacklisted. If you send emails though your own domain name, you should perform monthly checks to ensure it has not been blacklisted. It only takes a few users to report your emails as spam - either correctly or incorrectly and your emails will be diverted to the spam folder. This is especially a problem where you share a server and other accounts have the same ip address. If someone using another account on your server, spams and gets reported it is often the whole server which will be blacklisted.
Another problem is that some customers have different email addresses registered with paypal & eBay. If they purchase a product from eBay, they would expect it to be sent to their eBay email address - where I would initially send it to the paypal email address. A solution to this problem, is to send it to the email address registered with Paypal and cc a copy to the alterative address. A further step would be also sending a brief message to the customer through My eBay, informing them the product has been sent via email and asking them to contact you should they encounter any problems.
There are other options which to ensure the email gets received, such as email tracking but these can easily be blocked by the recipient. Overall, you need to ensure you are easily contactable should the customer not be able to find the product - at least this way, you'll have the option to iron out any problems before they bring more problems. |
