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Add testimonials to improve your auction results!

(Posted August, 2003):

eBay sellers, would you like to get higher prices and more bids than your competition! Though I've been selling on eBay for a long time, and am pretty proud of my results (user id mdmsports), I'm never too proud to consider new techniques to improve the number of bids on my dutch auctions, increase the winning bid price on my single-item auctions, or just outsell the competition on items that aren't unique.

If you've read some of the sales pages on either direct mail flyers you get in the mail, or on sales pages selling items on the internet by professional marketers, you've seen how the attention grabbing sales letters make good use of testimonials. The reason is simple:testimonials give comfort to someone who doesn't know you, and on eBay, what better testimonial than all the positive feedbacks you've earned? I experimented years ago on an auction for leather jackets. There must have been 50 sellers of the same item, using the same picture, and most of us were buying from the same wholesale company at the same price. So what I did to try to get an advantage was to insert some positive feedback quotes from prior auctions and immediately my bids went up. The problem was it took me hours to extract the feedbacks (since the ones for the jackets were sprinkled among ones for 100 other auctions), and typing them in, creating the HTML, etc. was a chore. So even though I was convinced it worked, and proved it, I was too lazy to follow through with my other 99+ auctions.

The other day I found a new tool, sold by one of the few "Platinum Powersellers" (those doing $25,000 or more each and every month on eBay). The tool automates what was too tough to do manually. It's called FAME ("Feedback Ad Maker for eBay"), and it really will increase the bids and ending prices for those that already have a decent proven track record on the auction site (i.e. good feedback history). I bought it and started using it the same day, and I've seen the positive results.

Here's an actual screen shot of a feedback table that took me all of less than five minutes from beginning to end to insert into my auction description:

I'm convinced, this simple and inexpensive tool has made me a bunch of extra sales already. There's nothing like making sure your potential buyers are comfortable. Do you know how many click away because they have some uneasy feeling? Even just because they want to search to find competition to see if they're more comfortable elsewhere? Do they come back, or do they forget about you? In any event, I highly recommend this tool, it's my tip of the day, August 20, 2003. For more information, click here.