eBay Seller Tools Team to Take Questions on Reaching Customers

eBay is holding its next monthly chat session next week. Employees from eBay’s Seller Tools team will be on hand to answer questions from sellers.

The theme of the chat session is “How to reach your customers.” That was a head-scratcher for one seller who responded to the announcement who brought up the fact that reaching out to customers was against eBay policy.

John Norman of Max Optical LLC asked, “Are they my customers or eBay customers? If they were my customers I would use all my marketing tools to get repeat sales. Unfortunately calling, emailing, sending postcards, and pushing online ads are all against the eBay TOS.”

However, eBay has made it possible to reach shoppers “generically” – such as sending seller-initiated offers and sending coupons to repeat buyers, which may be what eBay meant when it said “how to reach your customers.”

eBay eliminated its free-for-all weekly chats in May and replaced them with monthly moderated chats on a single topic. Next week’s chat is scheduled for July 13 at 4:00 pm Eastern, you can ask your own questions and follow along on this thread on the eBay discussion boards.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.