Section 5.6. After the Auction

5.6. After the Auction

Ah, sweet success. A buyer has purchased your vintage Hopalong Cassidy lamp for more than you were secretly hoping to get. Even though the auction is over, you're not done yet. You still have a few details to attend to before you can spend your hard-earned cash.

5.6.1. Invoicing the Buyer

As soon as your auction ends, you get one of two emails from eBay. If your auction ended without any bids, eBay invites you to relist your item. To relist an item, go to My eBay and look under Unsold Items for the item you want. In the Action column, click Relist and follow the instructions.)

If someone won your auction, you get a congratulatory email with the details of the listing, the final price, and the buyer's email address. The congratulatory email contains a link you can use to create and send an invoice to the buyer. (Chapter 9 shows how you can automate the process of sending buyers invoices after the auction ends.)

5.6.2. Getting Your Money

Many buyers pay via PayPal as soon as the auction ends. Others will contact you to let you know they're sending payment through the mail. In either case, it's good selling juju to contact buyers to thank them for payment and let them know when you'll ship the item. New buyers especially get nervous if they don't hear from the seller within a few days of the auction's end.

If a buyer pays via PayPal, you get an email from PayPal letting you know someone has sent you money. Sign in to your PayPal account to accept payment and transfer the funds into your bank account, as shown in Figure 5-12. The minimum you can withdraw from your PayPal account is $10.

If you prefer, you can request that PayPal send you a check. To do so, sign in and select Withdraw "Request a check from PayPal," then type in the amount you want and select the address where PayPal should send the check. Getting your money out of PayPal by checks takes up to a couple of weeks and costs $1.50.

Withdrawals can't be canceled , but if you decide you want more money in your PayPal accountif you use PayPal to pay your eBay fees, for exampleyou can add funds to PayPal from your bank account easily and without charge. It's the same process in the other direction. Click the My Account tab, then Add Funds. PayPal takes you through the same process of specifying a bank account and an amount, then transfers the money.

Tip: Transfer money out of your PayPal account to your bank account as soon as your auction endsor daily if you're a high-volume seller. Doing so makes your money more easily available to you. And if there's a problem with a buyer (it does happen) and PayPal freezes your account, you won't have to go hungry while you're resolving the issue.

Figure 5-12. To transfer money from PayPal to your bank account, sign in to PayPal, and select Withdraw "Transfer funds to your bank account." Type in the amount you want to transfer, choose the account, and then click Continue. Bank transfers take three or four days to process and must be in U.S. dollars.

5.6.3. Packing and Shipping

Two of the three biggest buyer complaints on eBay are poor packing and slow shipping (the other is poor communication). You don't want complaints, of course; you want satisfied buyers who buy from you again and again, tell all their friends how great you are, and leave you positive feedback. Use the tips you find in this section to pack securely and ship wiselyand you may never hear a complaint.

5.6.3.1 Pack smart

Packing is a lot more complicated than slinging something into a box and sealing it up. You have to pack the item in a way that protects it on its journey from your house to the buyer's. Start by wrapping the item in plastic; you never know when the shipper might be trying to deliver packages in a torrential rain. If the item is small enough to ship in an envelope, use a padded envelope for extra protection, or improvise by wrapping the item in bubble wrap before putting it in a regular envelope.

Bubble wrap and Styrofoam peanuts probably cushion items bestthey're a must for fragile items. If you buy on eBay yourself, save the packing materials that come with items you receive to use them when you ship out your merchandise. You can recycle old newspapers by crinkling them up and using them for padding, although the newsprint can be messy, and wadded-up paper tends to compress in transit, so don't use it for fragile stuff. If you have a paper shredder, you can use it to create inexpensive packing material; shred your junk mail, newspapers, and old magazines.

Tip: Many eBay sellers buy their packaging materials cheaply on eBay or get them from other online suppliers like Uline (www.uline.com) or BubbleFAST (www.bubblefast.com). Also, try calling local gift shops, the ones that stock their shelves with lots of snowglobes, crystal figurines , and other fragile items. When a new shipment comes in, these shops have to deal with tons of packing materials. Sometimes they'll give away boxes, bubblewrap, plastic peanuts, and so on, so they don't have to recycle them.

Make sure you use a heavy cardboard box larger than the item you're shipping. You can often get boxes from local grocery stores or other retailers. Fragile items can benefit from a second box, at least three inches bigger than the first on all sides; put cushioning material between the two boxes to keep the item extra safe.

If you ship via Priority Mail, you can get free boxes from the post officethey'll even deliver them free to your doorbut you must use Priority Mail to ship. Figure 5-13 shows some of the free boxes available.

Before you seal your box, give it a gentle shake. If you can hear things moving around inside, add more cushioning. Look at the sides. If they're bulging, your box is too small.

Note: According to the Postal Service, too-small boxes are the #1 cause of items breaking during shipping.

Finally, seal your item securely on all seams. Use packing tape, not masking tape, Scotch tape, or even duct tape. If your item is heavy, use reinforced packing tape.

Pack carefully to save yourself problems with an unhappy buyer. It's better to over-pack than to have the item broken or damaged in transit.

5.6.3.2 Shipping

It used to be that you had to wait in line at the post office balancing a huge stack of packages to ship your stuff. No more. When your items are packed and ready to go, you can have your shipper come to you.

When choosing a shipper, keep in mind the two factors that determine cost: weight and speed. The heavier your item and the sooner you want it to get there, the more you'll pay. Shop around to find the most reliable shipper at the best price.

Figure 5-13. Some sellers have tried to reuse Priority Mail boxes for other kinds of shipping by cutting them apart and turning them inside out to look like a plain brown box, then using them to ship via first class, parcel post, or media mailall of which are cheaper than Priority. If you get caught, you have to pay the full Priority rateand the Postal Service considers it mail fraud, which is a felony.

Start with eBay's Shipping Center (Services Shipping Center), shown in Figure 5-14. Also check out the Web pages of the Postal Service (www.usps.com), UPS (www.ups.com), Federal Express (www.fedex.com), Airborne/DHL (www.dhl-usa.com), and other shippers to see what they have to offer. Most offer free shipping supplies and will let you schedule a pickup at home. Many also offer free tracking or delivery confirmation.

Tip: Always make sure that you have some way to track the package or confirm the shipper delivered it. You can use tracking to assure a buyer that the item is on its way. And if a dispute arises, you might need to prove you sent it. This is especially important if you accept PayPal; if a buyer files a PayPal complaint against you saying they didn't get the item, it's totally up to you to prove that they did. Without proof of delivery, the seller automatically loses any PayPal nonreceipt dispute.

PayPal also has a convenient shipping center. When a buyer pays with PayPal, you have immediate access to PayPal's shipping tools by clicking the Ship button that appears with the payment details. Select a carrier (the U.S. Postal Service or UPS), print your label and a packing slip, and pay right from your PayPal account.

Figure 5-14. At eBay's Shipping Center, you can calculate how much shipping will cost with different shippers and shipping options, print labels, track your package, and connect with the Postal Service, UPS, or a freight hauler.

Stamps.com (www.stamps.com), shown in Figure 5-15, is another popular site for buying postage online and printing it out yourself, but the software you need currently doesn't support Macs. Mac fans need a Windows emulator to run it (an emulator lets you use Windows software on a Mac). Also, Stamps.com works only with the U.S. Postal Service, not other shippers.

If a buyer purchases multiple items (always a good thing!) and you plan to ship everything in one box, make sure you get only one payment for everything. Under PayPal's Seller Protection plan (see the box on Section 5.4.7), every payment you accept requires its own delivery confirmation numberand you can't get a separate number for each Beanie Baby you pack into a single box. So what do you do if a buyer orders 14 Beanie Babies and has already paid for each one separately? Refund those multiple payments and send an invoice for the combined total of everything he purchased (include shipping fees).

Tip: When you print your shipping labels with any service, use the "stealth postage" option so that the actual postage amount doesn't appear on the printed label. Even if your handling fee is completely reasonable, some buyers go ballistic when the postage shown on the package is a penny less than the amount they paid for shipping. Hide the actual postage cost, and they'll never know the difference.

Figure 5-15. Stamps.com lets you print out postage from your computer printer. After a free four-week trial, the site charges $15.99 a month for its service. You can print stamps and shipping labels directly onto envelopes, stickers, or plain paper.

5.6.4. Leaving Feedback

Technically speaking, eBay doesn't require you to leave feedback for your trading partner (Section 2.1). But you still need to do it. Feedback helps everyone by describing, for all the world to see, how eBayers conduct their business.

Always leave feedback for the buyerbut not until the transaction is complete. Even if a buyer pays quickly, you're rating the whole transaction. If the buyer bombards you with email after the sale or complains about things beyond your control, you might want to take these things into account when leaving your feedback.