Secrets of the eBay

90 Secrets of the eBay Millionaires
packages, affixing labels, and so on. If you have a hundred items for sale and
those sales all end Sunday night, you might well have 60 or 70 packages that
you want to get to the shipper the next day. Yet, that’s part of the commitment
of being a PowerSeller. Another one is answering e-mail inquiries from the
shopping public, a subject explored in the following section.
Alan mentioned a cautionary tale that resulted from customs requirements
for an overseas shipment. It illustrates the importance of keeping your
paperwork. “Every so often you’ll have a problem,” he says. “The packages for the cell
phone boosters say ‘$19.99 value,’ for instance. I don’t ever fudge on a customs slip.
Whatever you bought, that’s what it gets sent for. On boosters, for 10,000 pieces a fellow
in Italy paid $350. I put down $350 on the customs slip. Once Italian customs opened up
the box, the slip said $350 value but they saw that each package says ‘$19.99 value.’ So
they wanted to charge the guy $199,999 in customs fees. I had to send by Express Mail
an affidavit (notarized) that he paid $350, plus a copy of the wire transfer stating he paid
for everything. They wouldn’t release it for the correct customs charge until he had the
documentation. It took three weeks.”
“I Average 1,000 to 1,500 E-Mails a Day.
I Go Through Them Real Quick.”
When you have as many as 2,000 items up for sale on eBay, you’re likely
to receive thousands of e-mail questions, too. Not everyone asks questions
about each of your items, of course. And the more complete you are with
the information you provide in your descriptions, the fewer questions you
are likely to receive. But still, you have to wonder how Alan Warshauer
gets through his e-mail—especially when he says that he averages 1,500
to 2,000 e-mail messages each day. Many PowerSellers hire an assistant to
help them get through the e-mails. Not hard-working Alan.
“I do it all by myself,” he says. How, I ask, can you possibly answer
so many e-mail messages without going crazy? “I go through them real
quick. A lot of e-mails are from people asking for total shipping costs,
or whether I can combine this or that, and I’m good at that. I try to do
everything as fast as I can. I can shoot through a couple hundred e-mails
in a short time.”
Like many sellers, he regularly checks his e-mail on his laptop or other
portable devices. “Every day I check e-mails several times a day. I spend at
least half an hour going through e-mails, doing what I can. It’s part of doing
business. People don’t pay attention to the fact that you’re out of town; they
want their stuff and they are not interested in an automatic reply that you’re
on vacation.”